Mannerbund & Family

One of the nice things about being in the vanguard of the Future, is that you can watch that Future shaped in discussions which will eventually dominate consciousness and shape the terms of debate in the age to come. One of those debates today in the Reaction-Sphere is whether civilization is rooted in the Warband-(Mannerbund), or the Family.

The Froude Society has some interesting remarks:

 In conclusion, illiberal Reaction is taking our leave from quisling revisionists. They are materialists who wish to govern by protocol, philosophically and spiritually joined to our enemies, at the foot if not at the hip. Any man of faith, be him Abrahamic or Pagan, must realize support of these leaders is a sin. They are deceivers who will stab us in the back the second our fight threatens their avarice, if they even take up arms when the time comes… They reject the hero, they reject the sublime, and thus any exoteric link to the Holy on High. Moreover, they do not even pretend to have any solutions for non anglo-civilizations, we speak truths that ring true for all peoples by historical precedent, that good governance and order is always Good.

The Reaction-Sphere still tends to sit on the fence when it comes to Monotheism: there seems a clear tendency of "pagan" reactionaries to prefer Mannerbunds, and for monotheistic ones to be clear that Family is the essence of civilization. 

I tend to think that arguing about this issue in a dichotomous manner is obviously futile - Men and their "ages" go through historical periods with greater or lesser emphasis on either Family/Mannerbund, but this is to look at the animal side of things. During a "Dark Age", the warband achieves notable prominence, but families do not go away, for all that. During a comfortable age of Plenty (eg., the Victorian?), families achieve dominant sway, yet fraternal and patriarchal alliances are still quite notable.

Considered from the principle, it is clear that the Family has precedence in origin: around the Family cluster the sanctities which separate us from the bees or the ants. Even so, the Warband itself, once acknowledged as secondary or derivative, has its own primacy & sphere, in which the family life is only admitted in the brotherly bond, which is through the nature of the mothers. The warrior caste is feminine in regard to the brahmin caste, and has to achieve the divine through a kind of passionate rending of the flesh, expressed in the martial ethos. It is masculine in regards to all else below it, but in its nature, considered to what is above it, it is feminine. This feminine bond is expressed in the fraternal band of brothers, & in order for it to be healthy (eg., non-homosexual, disciplined and regulated in violence, etc.), this bond flows from pre-existing familial structures. The Warband, by itself, cannot be a microcosm of the cosmos, but only represents the victory of the male principles over itself & its enemies: in order to achieve the Grail, the introduction of feminine figures will be required to complete the tale.

The health of the Mannerbund depends upon the health of its fraternal-paternal bonds, which have their origin in the family. I do not deny the importance of the Mannerbund: quite the contrary, I welcome back talk of its resurrection.

Ultimately, real authority is One, & can only stem from an invisible, male, transcendent principle, which nonetheless creates room/diversity for all other forms of existence. The family father or the imperial crown prince, or the war band leader of the Mannerbund (eg., Lancelot) are the foundation of civilization. It is the sanctity of the families clustering around these figures which betray their legitimate and divine nature.

The attempt to oppose family vs. Mannerbund is a moribund and futile distinction, which is unfertile.  

Our Thesis in a Nutshell: Christian Education

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 18^th 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-13^th 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.

1http://heidelblog.net/2014/04/is-humanism-evil-2/

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.

De Quadriformisratio

On The Quadrivium

Preface

"For what avails a golden key if it cannot give access to the object
which we wish to reach, and why find fault with a wooden key if it
serves our purpose?" (De Doctr. Christ., IV, 11, 26). - Augustine

This book is an extended argument for the utility, beauty, and subtle necessity of an ancient discipline and practice known as the Quadrivium. As we discuss the Quadrivium in detail in the following chapters, we will see that it is higher Number, as manifested by itself (Mathematics), in space (Geometry), in time (Music), and in Space plus Time (Cosmology). If the Trivium (grammar, logic, and rhetoric) is the means whereby the Egyptians are spoiled of their treasure, then the Quadrivium is the design for the tabernacle of the Lord, which was built with attention to mathematics, order, detail, and according to a design which was divinely inspired, according to the archetype of the true Jerusalem, which is from above and heavenly. The Trivium properly is the glory or the spirit of the Faith, but the Quadrivium properly represents the body or wisdom of the Faith, the matter of what is made known.

I say this as a generalization, since it is quite equally true to assert that the matter or content of the Quadrivium generates a style or form all of its own, just as the style and flair derived from the Trivium is capable of generating content or substance. Yet this, all the more, should inform us that the Trivium and the Quadrivium go properly together – they are indivisible at the highest level of human knowledge, and each is indispensable to the other.

In order to put this case at length, I will start in media res (in the middle of things) with the Trivium, its better known twin sister. All too often, both the Trivium and the Quadrivium have been allowed to rest in the hands of the enemies of the Faith, but lately, we have made progress in recovering one of them. It is a start, and a beginning. But there is more to the story, and much more to even that part of the story.

The 20th century witnessed the unexpected resurgence of something called the classical Christian school movement. Inspired by the famous 1947 Oxford essay by Dorothy Sayers, the movement took (as its hallmark) not only a return to God-centered education, but a focus on the ancient Trivium. In Sayers' words, she retrieved what she called a "modern Trivium – with modifications", from the dusty shelves of Oxford and the medieval period, and dusted it off to show it in a new light. Although she said her views were “neither orthodox nor enlightened", Sayers had the interesting and admittedly personal insight that there are roughly three stages of learning that you naturally see in the development of the human psyche, and that these three stages can roughly be correlated to the grammar, logic, and rhetoric of the old Trivium. She identified a poll-parrot stage elementary school stage, followed by a “difficult” stage of argument in the junior high years, and finally a rhetorical stage of expression in the late teen years, and beyond. This essay was republished in The Lost Tools of Learning, by Douglas Wilson, and became a set-piece for the classical Christian school movement.
Regardless of the possible critiques, objections, and second thoughts one may proffer to and about Sayers, her essay inspired the movers and shakers of the late 20th century in what may justly be called (along with homeschooling) a massive rebirth of Christian education. It is not too much to say that her essay was the efficient means of sparking a revival, of Christian education in America. Whether she was right or misguided, can be debated – those who began the movement were inspired by her essay, although it remains to be seen whether the revival will result in renaissance and restoration. Certainly, recovering the Trivium tradition was on the whole immensely important.

Dorothy Sayers, in her essay, asks if you've ever watched and wondered why it is that modern literate people cannot seem to define their terms, distinguish first principles, respond to arguments appropriately, or follow a highly complex chain of reasoning. She wishes us to see that it is the neglect of the Trivium disciplines which are indirectly responsible for the slobbish and retarded condition of our public discourse, & I for one am inclined to agree with her line of thought. It is certainly true that the medieval ancestors would have never tolerated such sloppy public discourse in their dialectic quod libetas or university debates. Whether Sayers was right or not in her theories of human learning and development, it is certainly true that restoring the Trivium to a central position would add lucidity to modern thought. Even her staunchest opponents would have to admit that it was a “happy blunder”, in that sense. It is not too much to expect, of a high school graduate, that they can define their terms (grammar), reason soundly and recognize confused reasoning (logic), and express themselves clearly (rhetoric).

Sayers, in her essay mentions the Quadrivium but skips over it for the time. She also concludes her essay with this striking paragraph:

“The combined folly of a civilization that has forgotten its own roots is forcing them to shore up the tottering weight of an educational structure that is built upon sand. They are doing for their pupils the work which the pupils themselves ought to do. For the sole true end of education is simply this: to teach men how to learn for themselves; and whatever instruction fails to do this is effort spent in vain.”

I would like to raise a question, at this point, one which she might (perhaps) have answered had she discussed the Quadrivium in more depth. Is there not a difference between Learning (on the one hand) and (Wisdom) on the other? The medieval idea (and the ancient one) was that education's goal was Wisdom, and not Learning per se at all, as much as it was cherished. The modern idea that education's purpose was the “shoring up of civilization” was only one aspect of their aims in instruction. Perhaps her choice of words was dictated by the audience she spoke to, and that is certainly the charitable point of view. Yet I would ask the reader to go with me a little deeper, into the Quadrivium, and the quest for Wisdom with a capital W, beyond the statistics of the US Dept. of Education, beyond the degrees and the dollars, beyond even the scholars, and certainly beyond what today is called “higher education”. To bring lucidity to modern thought is certainly desirable, but not if the assumptions of modern thought go unchallenged: it is certainly possible (for example) to hold a purely material view of the world, and defend it with grammar, logic, and rhetoric.

We may well go on to ask then (as she does not), why it may be that even were our collective discourse to become sharp and precise, it would still be lacking both elevation and sublimity. That is, having addressed the method of “how do we learn” and offered a strong correction, there still persists the question “what shall we learn about?”. What is the content and the form and the goal of Education? Originally the Trivium's whole point was to create a fortress and weapon of the Mind (in the service of Wisdom, and later, “the Faith”). Now along the way and incidentally, it certainly does manage a great deal of this, for in order to study the Trivium, students read a great deal in the classic humanities. It is hard to read Cicero and Virgil and Milton without acquiring some elevation and also some profound sublimity. Contact with the “classics” often imparted some of the tone and moral style in them to the mind of the student.

Nonetheless, reintroducing the Trivium will not formally or substantially solve the horrifying problem of the lack of substance, sublimity, and richness. By itself, the Trivium gives us comprehensiveness, efficiency and clarity, and style: but it can only borrow substance from the humanities which it uses to cut its teeth on - Greek and Roman history, literature, and philosophy. This is done indirectly, as the Trivium student works through the humanities. The humanities proper are to be considered as principle subjects, as opposed to the tool disciplines of the Liberal Arts (the Trivium + Quadrivium). Now it is true that Christian education addresses the issue of content directly through the confessions of Faith which over-arch the classical Christian movement. New Saint Andrews makes it clear that the context of the Faith defines the context which the Trivium works upon:

The Scriptures of the Old and New Testaments are our only infallible rule of faith and practice. The Lord Jesus Christ committed these inspired Scriptures to His Church (1 Tim. 3 :15). We therefore defer to the witness of the historic Christian Church as a genuine but fallible authority, subordinate to the Scriptures themselves, in discerning what the Scriptures teach. Because they faithfully witness what is taught in the Word of God, we receive the great creedal statements the Church has affirmed throughout the ages: The Apostles Creed, The Nicene Creed, and the Definition of Chalcedon. Moreover, we believe that the reformational confessions of the 16th and 17th centuries (including the Westminster Confession of Faith of 1646, the Heidelberg Catechism, the Belgic Confession, and the Canons of Dort), of all historic statements, most fully and accurately summarize the system of orthodox Christian doctrine revealed in Scripture. Therefore, the specific headings below do not exhaust our doctrinal understanding, but rather identify those doctrines that merit greater attention today.

NSA (New St. Andrews is the college which Douglas Wilson started and an intellectual headquarters of the movement in Moscow, Idaho) mentions the Quadrivium as something people can “go on to study” as part of more “advanced study”. So hasn't this settled the issue? Isn't this the way to “enhance the Trivium”? To do more than just impart lucidity to the conditions of modern thought, but to begin to challenge its core assumptions as well?

Their argument might run as follows - Christ Himself is the Substance of what the Trivium studies, and provides the treasure which the well trained classical Mind defends by attacking every thought hostile to Christ and taking it captive. So why cannot we say that the Faith, or Christ Himself, is the beauty, truth, and goodness which we seek? The “more” which the Trivium helps us to learn how to learn about? Can't we just weave the Greco-Roman (Hellenistic) world into a narrative which dovetails with the narrative of God's redemption in His people? And content ourselves with the history, literature, art, and philosophy of the classical era, spoiling its riches (to use Augustine's phrase) to adorn the tabernacle of the Faith of God? Can't we just develop a grammar, logic, and rhetoric of Truth, Beauty, and Goodness, as summed up in Jesus Christ? Why would we have to make things more difficult by adding canonical subjects which can handled electively? For that matter, why is music or geometry anymore important than pre-medical studies or foreign languages for high school students, or anthropology or nano-technology for our collegiates? In short, aren't we hunting snipes here? Or maybe just cow-tipping? Finally, doesn't the Quadrivium have a funny name? Just what is the Quadrivium, anyway? Doesn't it have something to do with mathematics?

Just as we define our method in the Trivium, a method for the mind, so we can call Christ our goal and content, the treasure chest of Beauty, Truth, and Goodness. So we seem to already have an answer of sorts, ready made, within the classical Christian movement – the sovereignty and majesty of the King becomes the material which the mind exercises itself upon. The Faith is the body of knowledge and belief which the Trivium uses and meditates upon, and even as students read about the wars of Caesar or savor the poetry of Homer, they are being taught to look through the lens of that earthly beauty, toward something “more”. By faith, we know what that “more” is. It is a sound argument, both cogent and well constructed, and the conclusions follow from the given premises; it can be beautifully expressed, and often is; it is capable of defining its terms, and it is an improvement on just adding Bible class to a public school education. This much, this far, is very sound.

The corollary to the above is that we really don't need the “Quadrivium”; not as Tradition defines it, or at least not the Quadrivium per se. Students can supplement the Trivium training, the theology and the philosophy of the Faith, and the exercises in the humanities, with courses in practical art, music, perhaps a foreign language other than Latin, maybe some athletics. We have our method, and we have our standard, goal, and our motive, which points us to the great body of truth - Christ. We seem to have it all, here. All that remains is the carrying it out. Go forth, we tell our young students, and take every thought captive to Christ! The Quadrivium is optional, but certainly not necessary or even extremely useful. At the very least, it is the mysterious younger sister of the pair, and by far the least important.

Now while the recovery of principal subjects (under the eye of the confessions of the Faith) does constitute a direct address to the problem of content, it still remains true that it fails to address the issue of the innate form of the content, by neglecting the tool disciplines of the Quadrivium, which impart a certain form or structure (a discipline) to the content indirectly preserved in the principle subjects and indirectly recovered through texts encountered in work with the Trivium. This includes, but goes beyond, mathematical Form in general, just as the Trivium includes, but goes beyond, linguistic Form in general.

If the Faith points us towards God, and the Trivium helps us sharpen our Mind, then the Quadrivium tells us something about the body and scope of Nature, considered in and of itself. Faith reaches the summit of the Divine (Super-Nature or the Lord God), and the Trivium teaches the Mind to reach its own summit in lucid self-reflection. But the Quadrivium investigates that which is Logos – that is, the specific and real union between God & Man. All three (confessional, linguistic, and mathematical) forms have a proper center of gravity, but all three include (or touch) each other. Remove one of the legs, and it weakens the structure of the whole, a structure which we express in the principal subjects like History, Literature, and even Philosophy and Theology.

We might go even further to illustrate this hunch. If the Trivium helps us "learn how to learn" (in Sayers arresting and concluding turn of phrase), the Quadrivium helps teach us what to teach, and how to teach it. The Quadrivium demonstrates intuitively how the Logos knits together the world of all that is, including God Himself. The Quadrivium tells us about the actual pattern God uses to draw Nature up into Super-Nature, transforming it and sublimating, making it One with Him. It teaches us to discern the method whereby God incorporates Nature (or the world) into Himself. It is a bridge between the Trivium and the Faith, just as it is a bridge between the Mind and Super-Nature. It considers all things as part of a whole, which is God.

Perhaps this is why the Quadrivium is not more discussed – it involves very old and deep theological realities which have been forgotten or distorted. We follow CS Lewis on this point – God is that which is most Real. In The Great Divorce, Lewis makes the case that the reality of God is the source of “reality”, and is therefore, more “real” than mundane reality. We become real by restoring His image and being transformed into His likeness. God created the world by an act of Love, withdrawing or “wounding” Himself, and then speaking the Creation into existence with the power of His word, out of the “Void” or “Nothing” which was created by His wounding. We do not live in a world of dead matter and empty space, but a world that is groaning and trembling as it works through the process of Redemption. Now, each of the theological confessions of the Church differ as to the details of how this works, but they all agree (at least in principle) that the end reality is that God will be “All in All”. Against the modern worldview of “atoms in motion” in a permanently cold and lifeless space, the Christian confesses that the world is being born again (however slowly this may happen). Indeed, the Christian confesses that God is already “all in all”, and that we work with Him (however slowly) to manifest this in time and space, which is not empty or dead.

The Quadrivium is important because it gives us very vivid and detailed hints and clues (often in mathematical form) how that “all in all” began, and towards what it is tending. While the Trivium may anticipate the final destination, showing us the foundations of grammar-Logos in the “Word”, giving us a peak at the inter-relations of the Logos between various entities and in certain processes, and revealing the beauty of the Logos through the highest flights the human mind and imagination is capable of, it is the Quadrivium which deals with the very concrete details of Creation and Redemption. As we shall see later on, the last of the Quadrivial sciences is cosmology, and this science actually unifies the Trivium with the Quadrivium, as well as linking it with the principal subjects and with the religion and reality of the Christian Faith.

If the Trivium is the energy which saturates knowledge and makes it lucid, allowing the mind and the subject to become one in order to “hit the mark”, the Quadrivium is the technique of the archer as he aims the arrow at the goal. The goal or aim is the Logos, that through which the worlds were spoken, and that towards which the worlds return. The Logos is the re-unified world restored to its original state and then glorified, as seen in the Logos-Incarnate, the first fruit of this redemption. Christian education (then) is not merely becoming useful or skilled in manipulating data or objects in a plastic, passive, dead Nature. Nature is not a supine and mechanical Artifice that can be assigned a “spiritual” direction, arbitrarily. This Nature is something which, eventually, will become the body of God, when the marriage of Heaven and Earth takes place, just as man and woman become One on their wedding night.

When this is clearly understood (and it is often not understood at all), the ancient Quadrivium appears in an entirely different light. Rather than being the “weak sister” of the Trivium, it is the disciplined inquiry into the Pattern of Patterns, the supra-rational Order which has order (Number), structure (Geometry), harmony (Music), and is becoming a Body (Cosmology) – the four paths of the Quadrivium. The medievals and the ancients, however imperfectly, had gotten this far, and in this respect, were far more advanced than we are today.

The Quadrivium is the science of the Logos, understood in its relationship to Nature. Nature is here used as a term to encompass what is both human and Divine. Since the worlds were created through the second person of the Trinity, and since Christ is fully man, and totally God, Nature itself partakes of this totality in a derivative manner. When this is applied to history, it readily and explicitly shows us how the Hellenistic world was part of the “fullness of times” mentioned in Galatians:

So also we, while we were children, were held in bondage under the elemental things of the world. 4But when the fullness of the time came, God sent forth His Son, born of a woman, born under the Law, 5so that He might redeem those who were under the Law, that we might receive the adoption as sons.…

God was using the Mediterranean basin (the cradle of Western civilization) to incubate a culture which dared to give full scope to man's rational powers (weak though they were) in the context of aiming for something “more” (Beauty, Truth, Goodness). It is for this reason that the Gospel of John opens with the words, “In the beginning was the Logos.” This is why the New Testament was written in koine Greek. It is why Paul quotes Aratus and Epimenides. It is why Christ refused to take up the mantle of the Messiah made in the image of Jewish nationalism. He was the “light of the World”. It is why Caesar came across the Rubicon with his soldiers to save a dying Rome. It is why Alexander was born to conquer the world. All of this was foreseen in the vision of Daniel, in which the dying Empires which prepared the way and inevitably fell short of the mark are replaced by an enormous boulder which covers the Earth and becomes the Holy Mountain. In Acts, Paul addresses the king:

"I am not out of my mind, most excellent Festus, but I utter words of sober truth. 26"For the king knows about these matters, and I speak to him also with confidence, since I am persuaded that none of these things escape his notice; for this has not been done in a corner.

The mighty acts of God were both grounded in Creation from the beginning, and yet were culminating in a holy purpose. While the Trivium may analyze the contents of Revelation in the Scripture (as well as the natural revelation in the spiritual and humane writings of the most noble and notable humans of the ancient world), it is the Quadrivium which shows us the full extent to which Creation remained faithful to the patterns of God, and how those patterns were achieving a subtle and wise purpose through God's Providence.

The Quadrivium is the missing arch in the classical Christian movement. It is the link between the Faith and the Trivium, a link which so many have questioned, impugning its integrity, sincerity, and holiness. It has the potential to energize the movement with a fullness of purpose that is impossible without its moorings and underpinnings. If the Trivium is a flying buttress of a Gothic cathedral, transferring the soaring weight of the vaulted roof safely to the ground, then the Quadrivium is the stained glass of the Rose window, which admits, tinctures, and filters the overwhelming brilliance of the sun. The Quadrivium is the architecture of the temple of God, the pattern and the design of the stained glass.

The Quadrivium course of study is what keeps the sharpness and efficiency of the Trivium from veering away from the stated aims of the Faith, by indissolubly linking it closely to the Logos, Who is the express image of the Father, source of Creation and Re-creation. It is the the link between Reason and Faith, in the context of Christian education; it is the making explicit of what should already be known and understood, but too often, sadly, is not. Without it, the Trivium risks attack from those who see in it an unholy alliance between the “world” and Christ, or perhaps just a slick marketing strategy designed to churn out good Christian rhetoricians who can be culture warriors, even just another smuggling in of anti-Christian doctrines in the form of humanistic reason. Without the Quadrivium, the Trivium is more exposed to charges that it is humanism, paganism, and anti-Christianity, since the glory that was Greece and the grandeur that was Rome can easily be mistaken for the City of God, and indeed was, by people more noble, wiser, and virtuous than many of our day. It is the Quadrivium which argues for a supra-rational Order or divine Reason which is antecedent to the brain and even the mind of Man, but towards which Man's destiny is tending. And it not only argues, it argues by the persuasion of concretely showing, or demonstrating, how that supra-rational Order has moved and is moving through the interstices of Nature to accomplish the divine plan of God.

The Emperor

Posted on 2014-12-26 by Logres

“The ones who truly love their traditions don’t take them too seriously. They march to get their heads shot off with a joke on their lips. And the reason is that they know they’re going to die for something intangible, something sprung from their fancy, half humor, half humbug. Or perhaps it’s a little more subtle. Perhaps hidden away in their fancy is that pride of the blueblood, who refuses to look foolish by fighting for an idea, and so he cloaks it with bugle calls that tug at the heart, with empty mottoes and useless gold trim, and allows himself the supreme delight of giving his life for an utter masquerade. That’s something the Left has never understood, and that’s why its contempt is so heavy with hate. When it spits on the flag, or tries to piss out the eternal flame, when it hoots at the old farts loping by in their berets, or yells “Women’s Lib!” outside the church, at an old-fashioned wedding (to cite just some basic examples), it does so in such a grim, serious manner — like such “pompous assholes,” as the Left would put it, if only it could judge. The true Right is never so grim. That’s why the Left hates its guts, the way a hangman must hate the victim who laughs and jokes on his way to the gallows. The Left is a conflagration. It devours and consumes in deadly dull earnest. (Even its revels, appearances notwithstanding, are as grisly an affair as one of those puppet parades out of Peking or Nuremberg.)The Right is different. It’s a flickering flame, a will-o’-the-wisp in the petrified forest, flitting through the darkness…”

The Camp of the Saints,  Jean Raspail (1925–) a French author, and explorer.

The Number of the Emperor is Four; this is the sign of Earth’s four elements, and also the procession of the movement of Being out of the perfect triangle-circle of One-Two-Three, into the world of material creation, the union of spirit and matter. The Emperor has authority because he has achieved existence, he knows something, & he is capable of acting (1-2-3): he can therefore assume the post of emperor because he is “earth of earth”, “the most human of humans”, King David – a shepherd, a hero, a champion, a warrior, an outlaw, a king, a sinner, a saint. He is the manifestation of the Divine in the form of he who bears the sceptre, and is (therefore) the wielder of the sword not in vain.

The rise of the emperor to the post appointed for him by God occurs in the topsy-turvy world: for this reason, the emperor is “out on the green grass”, under the skies. His authority originated in the fact that the power of his being is such that he can hold court in the wilderness, and indeed (most likely) this may be where he plants the seeds that lead to his rule. As Rosenstock-Huessy argues in Out of Revolution, real political authority is worth nothing unless it is so powerful that it first begins “under the stars” or the clear blue skies. We reject the “whiff of Hegelianism” that wafts from Huessy’s work; however, he is correct to say that political authority changes with the revolution of the stars, and that even the secular revolutions (which aped legitimate procession of government) adhere to this change that which falls from the skies first (particularly when government is corrupt and asleep at the wheel). Auctoritas comes from the one who is self-restrained and crucified: that is, the emperor does not need the outer symbols to rule – they come to him like gravity draws smaller objects: he is comfortable at first, not with worldy power, but with naked Being. Like the sage on the mountaintop, the emperor sits by the river banks, or in the woody dells, or out in a cow pasture. He dwells outside the “city”, when the city is falling apart and degenerate. He is at home within his own skin, and is free from worldly A influences which dominate the “kingdom of this world”. He is King Alfred living in the swamps, awaiting his chance to reconquer England from the Vikings.

This is the opposite of the career politician, the demagogue, or the opportunist. His power comes from power over self, not over other people. He holds sway over others, and carries or embodies real authority over them, and as a result, he exercises legitimate power. Tomberg makes the strong case that compulsion is superfluous for those with real authority: “where there is authority, there is present the breath of sacred magic filled by the rays of light of gnosis emanated from the profound fire of mysticism, there compulsion is superfluous”. Viewed this way, Leftism or revolutionary thought is basically like a mental disease, which is healed by true action on the body politic through the esoteric organs. This is consistent with the doctrine of the Gnostic Church as the “heart” of the organized Petrine and Pauline Churches.

“The Emperor has renounced movement by means of his legs (they are crossed) and action by means of his arms (one hitches the belt, the other holds the sceptre).” The “instinctive and impulsive” nature of the Emperor is restrained, by self-restraint acting under Divine influence. It is this, and this alone, which allows him to hold the post of guardian of the office of Empire. When King Alfred made peace with the Danes, but had Guthrum baptized, he secured the Anglo-Saxon kingdom of England and the Danelaw as a united realm, bringing peace to the land. He could have hid vengeance in his heart, but instead, he converted his enemy, quite literally, to a friend. It is this type of action which the Holy Roman Emperor aimed at, being king of kings and lord of lords, the means by which the petty rivalries of monarchs (which would later destroy Europe in repeated conflagrations) were brought to heel before the sacred body of the King. Tomberg remarks that the Middle Ages contain a wealth of political theory (which is unique, even from classical Greece and Rome) on the post of the Emperor: under this list, we include Dante (who sided with the White Guelphs in the Ghibelline controversy) and John of Paris.

“The emperor has renounced personal opinion to receive revelation of Truth, personal action in order to become a vehicle of sacred magic, the way of personal development in order to be guided by the Master of the Way, and his own personal mission in order to be charged with a mission from above.” This makes him the “source of Law and Order”.

I think I have quoted Bonaventura before: That which is not confined by the Great, but is contained by even the smallest, it is that which is Divine. God (the Self beyond Self) becomes King in respect of those who freely worship Him, and He is crucified in relation to those who choose to fight or struggle with that freedom against the Font of Freedom. In both cases, a withdrawal is accomplished in order to establish a realm of freedom. Hitler and Napoleon, both, attempted to occupy the post of the shadow of the Emperor, but they took up the sword to do it. That is, they placed their trust in worldly machinations: power and the grapeshot or Panzers that were seen to produce such.

There is an Emperor of Europe, of Christendom. The post is occupied. It in our day is occult, in shadow, but God does not allow a vacuum in Nature: the man who has a vacuum of Ego and Pride will be courted by the Spirit for the post of Emperor, and there is undoubtedly an occulted Emperor today, in 2014. The complete synthesis of mysticism-gnosis-magic which is effected in the Emperor is also, Tomberg states, the definition of initiation, where eternity and the present moment meet together.

Mysticism becomes true without falsehood (Gnosis), and most certain (magic), and then absolutely certain in the light of pure thought as both subjective and objective experience (Hermetic philosophy): the Emperor is the hermetic synthesis of the emanations of God’s light upon the world, though he may be unappreciated, unknown, hidden, or occulted.

“Presumption? It would be a monstrous presumption if it were a matter of human invention instead of revelation from above.”

“Ask” (mysticism or touch), “seek” (gnosis or hearing), “knock” (magic or sight/vision) – Luke 11:9. These become comprehension. This is initiation. The goal of initiation is depth, or “niveau”. For the post of emperor, the aim is the realization of patriarchy, the “father-man”, the most human of all men, the heir of David. It is the four wounds spoken of which mark the Emperor, and provide him with the concrete experience to fulfill his destiny, to be anonymous, or (rather) synonymous with the post of Emperor itself : hence it is said, King Arthur only sleeps, as does the “King under the Mountain” (the Holy Roman Emperor). If the king sleeps, he shall return.

Indeed he is already here.

This bears reflection upon in the present day, for those who want to rebuild the monarchies. It was the Empire which gave birth to kings, the Holy Empire, and not the kings who built up the Empire. Rather than seeking to restore a particular pedigree or bloodline, thus exposing these men and the movement to an undoubted reaction which will be most violent, more thought should be put into finding the occulted Emperor, and also, collating and honing the methods and practices which will produce divine candidates of this quality. There is a lot of synthesis to be done in esoteric studies, and it can only be done rightly by those who have experienced it. The Emperor will require men of depth around him to respond to his authority, & also to embody emperorship in their little field of influence. Has anyone given thought to joining the Gnosis seminar? Mouravieff gives a practical method for recovering the initiation of Christendom.

One ought to try to recognize Emperor within one’s self, by seeking that which is truly Just. As Cologero has outlined, justice is the synthesis of moderation (the man of the senses), courage (the man of the emotions) and wisdom (the man of the intellect). You can see the same symbolism of numeric progression: what does Courage have to do with Gnosis? This is surprising, as one would expect Intellect to correlate with Gnosis, and Courage with Magic. When such a deliberate contradiction to our “everyday” wisdom or literalness is generated, there is an opportunity to look more deeply. The man of Gnosis needs courage as the primary virtue because it goes so strongly against the “naive realism” which dominates worldly thinking. The man of Magic requires intellect, because he has already mastered courage (or courage has mastered him) and he requires mastery of the science and art, since Magic is potentially quite dangerous. Fast (senses), Watch (master passions), and Pray (effect the use of Magic under the name of God alone).

The Curious Case of the Missing Latin Inscription: James Jordan's view of Classical Education

James Jordan's position is somewhat between that of North and Wilson:

I submit that to far too great a degree, Bible-believing Christians are allowing Roman Catholics and secular conservatives to do their thinking for them. Both of these groups advocate a return to the synthetic culture called “Western Civilization,” an unholy (and unstable) mixture of Greco-Roman paganism and Biblical religion. Many writers in these groups are brilliant and sometimes have penetrating insights, but this does not change the fact that what they advocate is basically a mixture of Baal and Christ. The so-called “canon” of Western literature is such a mixture, often including far more non-Christian work than Christian work. The situation as regards political philosophy in Western Civilization is, if anything, worse.¹

 

Aha. Here we have the old charge of syncretism. Like the words fascism or sexism or racism, it has increasingly come to mean merely “whatever I don't think is Biblical” or (worse) “whatever I don't like” in polite circles of debate and conversation. Actually any word with an -ism on the end is essentially a short circuit for thought. Thus, Puritans could denounce Christmas as “paganism” without actually bothering to deal with the spirit of Christmas. As a kind of shorthand, which one is willing to define at the drop of a hat, and in detail, we may perhaps forgive the use of the term. But Jordan uses the term, here, moralistically. That is, you are already supposed to know exactly what he is talking about, and to agree with it.
He continues:

These men and the many others like them have much good to say, but essentially they want to turn back the clock to a situation where pagan and Christian thinking is merged into the “Western” synthesis. To be sure, they tend to read the pagan Greeks and Romans through Christian eyes, creating imaginary Platos and Ciceros who did not ever really exist. But also, they do not take a high view of the Scripture, especially of the societal directives God spoke to Israel at Mount Sinai, and thus are much influenced by pagan ways, often without realizing it. As mentioned above, Western Civilization is over. That is to say, the tradition of that civilization has been broken now by two generations of ignorance and apostasy, extending from the “Sixties” to today. Therefore, the question before us as Bible Christians is this: Do we strive to restore that tradition, or should we look to the Bible and strive to create something better?

      Again, he is describing something he takes as a given, and appealing to a moral evaluation in common with the reader. But what, really, is the “merged synthesis with a Plato that never existed”? What does Baal plus Christ look like? I would imagine he would cheerfully chirp, “a classical Christian school, of course!”. The lack of a high view of the Deuteronomic social objectives, he cites, specifically characterizes the syncretizers.

The early post-Apostolic Church was engaged in spiritual warfare with the Greco-Roman civilization, and was not interested in forming any kind of synthesis with it. Even in this time, however, many of the leading thinkers of Christianity were adult converts from philosophy, and they brought with them a great deal of pagan baggage. With the conversion of Constantine and the recognition of Christianity as true religion, things changed. Many people came into the orbit of the Church who were only scantily discipled, and with them came a host of pagan concepts and practices. 

      This is demonstrably incorrect. Clement of Alexandria (to mention a notable an unusual example) headed the catechetical school at the old Greek city-state of Alexandria in modern day Egypt. This “mystery” school actually initiated new converts in two stages into the Christian religion. Their philosophy was based, not merely on Greek categories of thought, but Egyptian myths. At one and the same time, they gave full authority to Scripture. Where people like Jordan see a rift or dichotomy, they insist there is full harmony. Clement and James Jordan cannot both be right. And Clement was no exception. Virtually without exception (Tertullian is the raccoon in the pantry) every single patristic early Church father that we have any written record of was a “syncretizer”. So we know exactly what this syncretism looked like. It wasn't Baal plus Christ (you can thank Rome for that, as Chesterton argues in The Eternal Man), it was truth plus Christ. Or, truth plus Truth. Some Christians may have gone so far as to argue it was Truth plus Truth. They thought this way because (unlike the modern man who specializes in binary dichotomies, or what he calls “logical antitheses) they thought that the culmination of Truth illuminated that which preceded it, and so to them, the truth of the Moon “lit up” with the truth of Sun. So Jordan needn't be vague in his terminology here: he has a wealth of things to choose from. Bonaventura, for instance, explained that the “intellect” or “heart” (this is the Scriptural word) has stages of contemplative illumination which can actually lead to the vision of God. By “explained”, I do not mean in the same sense Jordan takes the Old Testament: as a kind of lawnmower manual or schematic diagram which we can re-apply to human condition. Bonaventura is unfolding symbols that which actually have objective existence in the subconscious structure of the human mind, and the method he uses for this can be fairly described as Platonism. Has Jordan actually read Itenerarium Mentis ad Deum?


     Here is how Douglas Wilson characterizes Jordan:

      God interrupted the Hebraic world, moving to Hellenistic thought forms, argues Douglas Wilson, where God grafts in wild olive branches, so that we would have to deal with new issues, new categories. Wilson, in his comments on Jordan, thinks that we have to assimilate without capitulating, not by syncretizing, but combining and interacting in a way that is faithful to Scripture. In addition, you “play cards with the hand you are dealt”: this means being familiar with Roman categories and language and thought which is more accessible, and doable, than recovering Greek and Hebrew, right away. He thinks that the Hebrew contribution to local democracy, for instance, is much too often minimized, and that a “false dichotomy” is being set up between academics and character. His college, New St. Andrews, does in fact teach Hebrew. Your brain is not like a shoebox that can be filled up, but is more like a muscle, which can be conditioned. He cites the Reformation, in which scholars learned Greek and Hebrew, and wrote in Latin. All of this is a ladder, which we shouldn't kick out from under us, but rather use to try to get to where we are going.²
 
      Jordan almost stumbles over the truth when he says in Part 3:

This is the development of “philosophy,” which came about in pagan lands at about the same time as the prophetic movement was raised up by God among His people. Siddhartha Gautama (Buddha), Kung Fu-Tsu (Confucius), Lao-Tse, Plato, and Aristotle were roughly contemporary. Each sought to replace worship with contemplation, a further step of apostasy from God. Each of these three was a Cain.

      The tendency of the early Church was to see, instead, that these men came at the same time as the prophets because they represented the same spiritual development or revelation, from God, suited to the types and groups of people they were sent to. The Eastern mind (and body) is not identical to the Hellenistic one (which is not the same as the Hebraic, for that matter). That being the case, God's prophetic challenge to the Far East looked a great deal different than His mission to the Hebrews. Now, yes, it is fair to say that the mission to the Hebrews was unique and special. This does not entail that God had no revelation that was parallel or analogous in other parts of the world. In fact, this contradicts Romans 1, Psalms 19, and even Pentecost, where everyone heard them “speaking in their own tongue”. The problem with this “Biblicism” is that it is so un-Biblical. Even the prophets proclaimed that other nations would “come up to Jerusalem” for spiritual learning, just as the Magi came for the Christ child. Listening to Jordan, you'd think that the Magi were little Cains lead by demons to come and mock baby Jesus in the manger.
    
      Jordan's problem is really larger even than this. What he wants to do (essentially) is to rip out Greco-Romanism, and plug in the Old Testament. To his mind, this is “safer” and more Biblical. Thus, instead of learning about and emulating the Mediterranean basin peoples, we would learn about and emulate (or not emulate?) the ancient twelve tribes of Israel. The Old Testament would become our canon, and (presumably) Old Testament canon law would become our politics, Old Testament canon literature our light reading, and Old Testament canon prophecy our philosophy. What's odd about this is not apparent at first glance. Indeed, there is nothing wrong with studying Job instead of Euripides: Job is a very under rated tragedy, and indeed, is more sublime and profound than Aeschylus or Euripides. What's odd is that the very thing he objects to in classical education (the syncretism) becomes the very thing desired in this new form of education. If Christ's coming made nothing clear, it certainly showed how Biblical culture ended up in the very opposite condition, so opposite that they crucified God's son. In other words, they performed the ultimate Satanic and pagan act. I don't deny that learning and studying this has profoundly necessary lessons – in fact, that's the same reason Greco-Roman culture can be studied – what is odd is that Jordan seems to think that substituting Hebrew for Greek will somehow magically ward off this end result, which he doesn't (for obvious reasons) talk much about.

     While Jordan admits we can and ought to learn artistic or scientific technique from paganism, he doesn't think this applies to the “liberal arts”:

Second, and more importantly, political philosophy (law, statecraft, etc.) operates in a different sphere from music, agriculture, and metallurgy. The latter operate in the area of dominion, the world beneath man. Politics operates in the area of man himself, the image of God, the social arena. And religion operates in the area above man. These three zones of life have different qualities, different languages, different psychologies. We can learn statecraft from the Greeks and Romans only if we start with the assumption that other people are merely things, like musical instruments.

      Apparently, we should learn religion and politics from the ancient Jews. Except this isn't quite right either. But I have to ask the most obvious question here: if we can learn politics and religion from God, by paying attention to His corrections of the ancient Jews, why can't we do the same thing with the Greco-Romans? That is, isn't God's wisdom principled and profound enough to apply in either case? If you are going to view the Old Testament as a lawnmower manual, can't you use the knowledge learned to work on another lawnmower? Wouldn't the prophetic injunctions apply just as much to ancient Greece and Rome, as to Jerusalem, perhaps even more so?
Jordan continues:

Because human beings are images of God, and because human society is to mirror the fellowship of the blessed Trinity, the Bible contains as much (if not more) teaching about social matters (man to man) as it does about religious matters (man to God). Indeed, the Bible says that how men relate to God is displayed in how they relate to one another (e.g., Matthew 25:31-46). By way of contrast, the Bible says next to nothing about dominion over the lower creation. The ways to make musical instruments, the ways to yoke animals, the ways to refine metals, etc. — all these we can learn from the city of Enoch.

      If the Bible teaches man how to relate to man, then a well taught and devout Christian young student should be able to relate to Plato. That is, if, the wisdom of God is greater than the wisdom of man. There is almost a practical atheism at work here, this secret, gnawing fear that if (gasp!) we let our young people pick up Plato, they “wont' be able to handle it”, and will be seduced by demons into deep, deep idolatry, worshiping the God-hating Cain-man in their own heart.

      If the Old and New Testaments teach anything, it is that you don't need Plato to become a God-hating, narcissistic, philosophical Satanist. The Scriptures are full of them, in both Testaments.
Jordan continues, and begins to really veer off the path:

Third, one has to ask what is the actual content of the political philosophy that we are asked to borrow from the Greeks and Romans. The answer to that question shows just how anti-God their thinking was, for the classical (Greco-Roman — and Buddhist and Confucian) view was that the virtue of self-control makes us fit to rule and to obey the rule of law. Education and self-discipline are essential to overcome our natural tendency toward slavery. Now, what is so wrong with that? The answer is that it is totally Satanic. It makes man into God. The Biblical picture is that it is not our control of ourselves, but our submission to God and His Word that makes us fit to rule and be ruled. However important and useful education may be, it is not the avenue by which we overcome sin. Rather, that avenue is faith-filled obedience. God tells us what to do, and we believe Him and do it, and that reshapes us. True society is formed not by a group of self-possessed mini-gods ruling everyone else, but by all people joining in obeying God’s commonly published and publicly available Book.

      Good God, sir. This isn't Biblical at all: this sounds more like what Sayiid Qutb or a post-modern Muslim terrorist would say about finding God. It certainly doesn't accord with Jesus' dark saying: The Kingdom of God is within you. Or, you search the Scriptures because in them you think you have Life, but I am He who testifies of them. At this point, Jordan is not being un-Western, but anti-Western: that is, he is embracing a thoroughly Koranic view, self-consciously poised over against, the Western theologies of the divine that developed out of the likes of Erigena, Bonaventura, and Aquinas. He is artificially contra-posing self restraint and submission to God. The Western view (and it is informed by the Greco-Roman philosophies) is that these are the same thing. When a man controls himself and restrains his evil impulses, he is cooperating with Divine grace which is always speaking to the soul.

First, the Bible teaches that God has clearly revealed Himself and that He clearly speaks in the Bible, so that there is no need for any quest. Second, sinful man hates God and is not on a quest for the true God at all, but is rather on a quest for anything that will block out his innate knowledge of the true God. Now, just what is all this “great classical literature” about? Homer is about the sin of man trying to make himself too big in the eyes of the gods, who then humble him. There is a truth here, but it is no different from the truth you’ll hear from any pagan tribesman anywhere in the world. Moreover, as much as anything else Homer’s gods are actually jealous of Achilles and Odysseus, and little else is admirable about these gods either. So, why should Christian children be subjected to Homer? Or, why Homer rather than the Gilgamesh Epic or the Kalevala? The sole reason seems to be that Homer is part of “Western Civilization.” But we are entitled to ask: Who cares? Why keep this baggage? Let college students studying the ancient world read Homer as a curiosity, but don’t use him in the attempt to form fundamental mind of the Christian future.

     I agree with his comments about the Kalevala. JRR Tolkien took just such an approach, and produced one of the greatest epics of all time. So we shouldn't get hung up, here. There is no need for any quest? If sinful man is on a quest away from God, then the quest is to forsake that quest by undertaking a greater, that of returning to God. Quoting the Bible at those who are voyaging through the abyss won't be nearly as effective as opening the Odyssey, and talking about God.
So he rejects classicism for “maturing minds”:

Such dangerous pagan literature can be appreciated by mature minds, but is just intellectual pornography for young minds, continually reinforcing the notion that man is the only god there is — which brings us back to pagan political philosophy.

I can see a point here, but it is poorly made. Who determines who is mature enough? What should maturing minds read? Wouldn't the best approach be to admit that we need teachers who can guide these young minds through the ancient world? And isn't this exactly the task classical education sets itself?
Now, personally, I tend to favor Christian European texts. That is, read Rosenstock-Huessy's Out of Revolution, rather than Polybius, or Humboldt or Alexander Vinet or Groen van Prinsterer, rather than Aristotle's Politics. If you start from where you're at, it may be advantageous to save Greco-Roman learning for more mature phases of development, and to concentrate on Kafka and Camus or something like that. But they're still dangerous too, maybe more so to some. You see the problem? His objection is that it is dangerous. Since Life is dangerous, at all times, moments and places, an emergency (as Rosenstock-Huessy describes) this objection carries merely rhetorical weight. And while danger can't be used as an argument to positively engage in something (eg., the student shouldn't have to read the Marquis de Sade), it is not really a good negative argument, if that is the only objection against it, and the person on the other side has positive reasons for selecting the literature. Maybe classically educated people just like and prefer Homer more than the Kalevala? Maybe there's just more scholarship and tradition on that side. And maybe Homer's a better poet than the Finn who jotted down the epic of the North.

      What texts would he have them read, as punching bags for their minds? Greco-Roman texts are admirably suited for critical teenagers. If you give a critical and argumentative person the Bible as their text, they may end up being needlessly critical of God's Holy Word. So an argument could be made that to do this is more dangerous, and more sinful, than to give them Greco-Roman tomes to shred and tear up and have fun with. I don't give my one year old a nice book to play with on the floor – I give him a cheap coloring book he can happily wad up and shred and crumple and sit on. I speak as if I agreed with his fundamental outlook here, but one can see that even from his standpoint, he's being arbitrary.

      I agree that man is homo adorans, not homo sapiens (worshiping, not thinking, man). But what makes Jordan think that thought and contemplation aren't worship? Again, false dichotomies. Is false dichotomy the essence of being a “modern man”? I tend to think so. How very un-Hebraic and very “Greek-like” of him.

The full empowerment of God’s people by the coming of the Holy Spirit meant that they were sent out into existing cultures to transform them, not that they were to go to a desert island and set up a “city on a hill.” 

      But...you've already said, sir, that we aren't to transform things like Greco-Roman culture, but reject them totally, and go out into a desert on a hill and refound Hebraic civilization.
When Jordan gets down diatribing against Greco-Romanism, he is eminently sensible:

The first is the centrality of worship. That means a daily chapel service. There is no need for preaching in this service, since supposedly the child is learning information all day long. Rather, the focus should be on singing the psalter and Bible passages, and memory of the proverbs. Do this every day for 30 to 45 minutes, and by the time the child is out of the eighth grade, he or she will know the entire Psalter by heart. Why would we settle for anything less? How dare we settle for anything less? Yet, though I have read here and there in Christian school material over the years, I have never seen this advocated anywhere. Second, we should take our cue from the Bible regarding what is important. Certain things stand out as very important in Biblical education: Bible content, music, martial arts. Certain things are obvious from their absence from Biblical culture: sports. I suppose most Christian schools do a fairly good job on Bible content, but what about music? If the second person of God is the Word of God, the third person is the Music of God, for Breath (Spirit) means the sounding of words out loud, which involves tone and timbre and rhythm, etc. It is pretty clear that worship in the Bible is musical (even if this is not much the case in American Christianity), and we are told that the Father seeks worshippers. The first goal of Christian education is to train worshippers, and that means to train musicians. It is clear in the Bible that the next thing people learn after they learn the Word of God is how to make music with it.

     I couldn't agree more with the emphasis on music, martial training, and sports. John Milton (who knew Latin and Roman mythology) argued precisely this same approach in the Aeropagita. Young men should know how to ride a horse and hold a pike and throw a ball. That's just the way things should be. So no disagreement here.

Well, then, what about other languages? The reason why learning a foreign language is regarded as a crucial part of a liberal education is that learning to view things from the standpoint of another language and culture sets a person free from the boundaries of his own. It makes him culturally free, and “liberal” means free. 

      And how can you learn a foreign language, Mr. Jordan, if you don't read the Literature? It appears that James Jordan has no quarrel with German or Russian, but only with Greek or Latin. I suppose he sees them as competing with Hebrew in a way that German does not. Well, perhaps he is right. Yet Spanish can displace God's word with man's wisdom as surely as any leather-bound tractacte of Aristotle. There is nothing magically demonic or especially horrible about Plato and Aristotle: you can go to hell reading Cervantes and Octavio Paz just as well, can't you, if you try? It's almost as if he believes that a knowledge of Hebrew will actually make man more holy. It perhaps could, but it could also make man more unholy. Nowhere is the temptation to evil so strong as at the foot of the altar. Surely that is the lesson of the Old Testament and even the cross, Mr. Jordan?

     Classical Christian education doesn't set up a competition between Greece and Rome on the one side, and Athens and Jerusalem on the other. Nor does it try to make them into a mush of porridge, the “same thing” by another name, interpreting the Bible with Greek concepts. Rather it is being faithful to the idea that “when the time was right”, Christ came into the world, not “into a corner”, but into the Hellenistic Mediterranean basin, and that the entire Levant and all Europe was illuminated by the light of that Incarnation, which showed the high holy Jerusalem which is in heaven, as she should have been, and the beauty that was Greece (as she should have been) with the power that was Rome, as little daughters and worshippers of that heavenly light. It is illuminating to see how Athens and Jerusalem differ, and how they are the “same”: they are both the same in that they both rejected Christ, but remember, Athens didn't crucify the Lord of glory. Jordan should be more imaginative, in the Inklings' sense, here. He's seeing false dichotomies and hunting witches; when he sobers up, his practical suggestions are very sound.

      It's no surprise that Jordan prefers the rascal Tertullian, who asked “what has Athens to do with Jerusalem?”, just as Pascal was said to have written “the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob is not the god of the philosophers”. Just so. There is a point to both meanings. But if the slogan is taken as absolute truth, and pushed farther than it will go, we end up contradicting the God of the Bible Himself, who is the “true Light that lightens every man that comes into the world”. No matter what categories or language he may happen to speak. Otherwise, there is no Pentecost.

1James Jordan, Biblical Horizons, The Case Against Western Civilization, December 2007.

2Interview with Douglas Wilson, Canon Wired, 2010.