Over one thousand years later, our Lord is asked which of the commandments are greatest. He answers, “You shall love the Lord your God… and your neighbor as yourself.” In this context, being asked “Who is my neighbor?” he responds by telling the parable of The Good Samaritan.

The idea of the neighbor would seem important for more reasons than I have the ability to comprehend, but one thing that leaps out to me is that the neighbor is an actual “concrete reality”, not an abstraction like “the world”.

My family has been watching Mad Men lately, so I watched a couple of episodes over the weekend and it’s easy to see why the series is so compelling. By looking at the inner life of an advertising agency in the early 1960′s, it provides a perspective on issues and ideas that dominate the contemporary mind and politics.

We are living through a transition perhaps unlike anything since the western Roman Empire dissolved into the Germanic Kingdoms during the long fifth and sixth centuries (or at least since the Reformation of western Christianity in the 16th and 17th centuries). In a single blog post, one can only speak somewhat glibly about a matter of such global import, but let me state some of the more obvious points. World Wars One and Two, especially WWI, ended the European Enlightenment experiment, which was itself a turn from and largely a renunciation of the European Christian heritage.

Vincent van Gogh, 1890. Kröller-Müller Museum. The Good Samaritan (after Delacroix). (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

The effects in America were delayed, but the United States of 2012 are not the United States of 1963 (the year I was born), much less the United States of 1912.

When we think of World War II, we speak of things like “the greatest generation,” the great courage of the boys who conquered the Nazi war machine, and “Our Finest Hour.”

As is so often the case, however, while we won the war, I believe we have lost the peace. The ideas that gave rise to Mussolini in Italy, Hitler in Germany, and Stalin in Russia were complex and local. That is why Italy gave birth to fascists, Germany to National Socialists, and Russia to International Socialists.

But it is not hard to see the common root of all three philosophies: the will to power unleashed by a relativism rooted in opposition to religion and the constraints of the Western (Greek, Roman, Jewish, and Christian) perception of truth. More briefly: power, relativism, and secularism.

These ideas now dominate American thought and politics, though the will to power bears many disguises.

For teenagers and pre-adolescents it is called “love” and sung about with ever-increasing cynicism. For most people it is called “rights” of one sort or another. In every case, love and rights have been made social and political commodities used to barter in the marketplace of power. They are the coin of the realm, as it were.

The trouble is this: as “coin” they are paper money or, worse, electronic digits. They are so abstract that you can make them mean anything you want. Love is a euphemism for desire. Rights are a euphemism for power.

The neighbor, on the other hand, is a real person, located in a particular place, with particular needs, offering particular temptations. In the so-called Christian “worldview”, the neighbor is penultimate, our duty to love him second only to our duty to love God.

“The world” is just another abstraction. Only God is able to love the world. Do not believe for a moment that you “are the world.” You are not. You are a neighbor. You are one person able to love other people as you come in contact with them through words, mind, and body.

The more we try to change the world, the more harm we do. When we gain the wisdom to defend and run our corners of the world (meaning our kitchens, dining rooms, bedrooms, living rooms, and yards), then we might be able to bring that wisdom to our communities.

The Good Samaritan by Aimé Morot (1880) shows the Good Samaritan taking the injured man to the inn. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

When other people try to meddle as we seek to fulfill our duties to our household and community, we ought to tell them to go away. Part of governing is protecting. The world is full of meddlers known as experts.

The rise of the expert is part of the movement of thought I mentioned above, toward the will to power, relativism, and secularism. The habit of mind that sustains and is motivated by this contra-trinity of ideas is abstractionism.

Because the public sphere is dominated by people who deny any place to religion in the discussion of public matters, anything that once was included in and expressed by the religious life has been absorbed by the expert, who is a secularized priest.

At this point I am going to make an assertion that will trouble people. It troubles me too. I am going to argue that in a very deep sense we lost World War II. Not to the Axis military powers by any means, don’t get me wrong. Hitler, probably with a sense of Wagnerian fulfillment, committed suicide. Japan surrendered, broken and humiliated. Italy gave up.

But when our boys came home, they came home to, and brought with them, an America that was deeply altered. How could it not have been? We had just endured four years of the most horrifying war in the history of the human race, in terms of sheer unleashed destructive power. The boys who returned did not come home whole and the nation they returned to was not a whole nation.

The wild optimism of the 50′s disguised a terror that embodied itself in bomb shelters and air raid drills, and in what President Eisenhower called “the military-industrial complex,” which he warned us against with genuine fear.

Americans have always been a nomadic people, at least northerners. But after World War II the best words to describe America might well be “anxiety-driven nomads”. We were unmoored and didn’t have any idea where the port should be. Our minds were unhinged. Everybody either “loaded up the truck and… moved to Beverly” or wished they could.

Out in California (and Seattle, and Denver, and, eventually Phoenix, Albuquerque, etc.) we would build a new world on new principles of love and freedom.

Then came the sixties.

Even as a child I was amused by the arrogance of the 60′s generation (probably because I they were a few years older than I), but as the years have passed and I’ve listened with my mind to the lyrics of the era, I chuckle ironically. In 1963 or so, what the world needed “now, is love sweet love.” And for the first time in world history, a group of east coast boarding school young people who read beatnick poetry had discovered this secret and were ready to reveal it to the world.

I cannot imagine what it must have been like for parents of the 30′s, 40′s, and 50′s to try to raise children. Increasingly centralized control over the economy and the minds of children through schools and media created an anxiety the world probably had never seen before. If it had happened suddenly, it probably would have created a panic. Instead it created an intense vulnerability for parents who wanted their children not to have to

The Good Samaritan by Rembrandt (1630) shows the Good Samaritan making arrangements with the innkeeper. A later (1633) print by Rembrandt has a reversed and somewhat expanded version of the scene. Roland E. Fleischer and Susan C. Scott, Rembrandt, Rubens, and the Art of their Time: Recent perspectives, Pennsylvania State University Press, 1997, ISBN 0915773104, pp. 68-69. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

live through a depression and a global war.

No children had ever had so much power, in the form of money. It would be silly to suggest that they created their own music forms, but the people who ran the recording industries knew how to take advantage of their new power and to direct it to their desired ends. For a couple years, a battle took place over who would dominate pop music: the Pat Boone’s with their “wholesome” (though, I would argue, syrupy) music or the more radical Little Richards. Elvis settled that question by forging a quasi-compromise, singing wholesome songs and unleashing the sexual charisma in a bewildering succession.

By the 60′s, marketers and the music industry had created the “teenager” (a term coined by the recently departed Dick Clarke) and the teenager felt his power. The generation gap was invented as a permanent condition so everybody could try to adjust himself to it. Parents were pushed further out of their children’s lives (a process begun much earlier by the legally coercive common school movement of the early 20th century).

Many vulnerable parents were relieved. They didn’t know how to raise children anyway, having spent most of their own childhoods separated from their parents. So they turned to the experts and made Benjamin Spock a prophet for an age (and spawned an industry of “how to raise your child on the new principles of social management and modern irreligious child psychology). They turned their vulnerability into a virtue by concluding that they were better able to raise children because they had the latest teachings on parenting.

The children took the same approach to love. Only, instead of reading books, they listened to music. The Beatles began with cute, innocent songs, like “I want to hold your hand” (yeah, right). And while I remain an admirer of the extraordinary creativity and musical talent on display in the music of the Beatles and Paul McCartney’s solo work, I cannot deny that their vision of love left much to be desired.

It wasn’t long before rock and roll and pop music were working a revolution of their own – one long ago predicted by Nietzsche. The generation of the 60′s was drunk on revolution and high on saving the world. They were convinced that their generation had found the path to truth, which was merely a path laid out for them by John Dewey in their schools. It was a path to “your own truth”, to finding yourself through experimentation, through mindlessly rejecting the traditions of your parents and ancestors, and through rising above the limitations of your place to find yourself in a new universal place that is nowhere.

Perhaps that is the essence of John Lennon’s wistful ending to his strangely judgmentally sympathetic song: “Isn’t he a bit like me and you?”

Believing they were rejecting, but in fact merely absorbing more deeply, what their parents had handed on to them, the children of the 60′s made relativism their defining value. They were thoroughly debunked. They were ready to be conditioned.

America was “preserved,” – or at least found some ballast for a few decades, and only partially – by her “rednecks”, people not smart enough or schooled enough or high enough to realize that all they had to do to save the world was give more power to the government in DC. But an instinct to preserve disconnected from the wisdom that knows what and how to preserve is as vulnerable as the California teenager.

No society can survive relativism. Over the next couple decades we might experience the reaping of the whirlwind.

Perhaps we will see the face of our Lord soon. Perhaps He has ordained a time of great testing for us. Perhaps He is done with us (ie. American Christianity). Perhaps He will surprise us by granting repentance and renewal. There is no way to know what the future holds, because He is merciful. But if it were not for His mercy, it would be easy enough to predict: chaos, violence, breakdown, and tyranny. Same as always.

If He grants repentance, though, it won’t be abstract repentance and emotional remorse. It will be a return to love of neighbor as the valid expression of our love for God.

Really, this is my point: as a people and a nation, we have adopted a philosophy of life that is about love in the abstract, love as a word to stand in for my own passions and desires, love that is about the lover and not the beloved.

Loving our neighbors is not liking or feeling good about them. It is actively willing, not power for ourselves, but their blessedness. And our first neighbor is the one we covenant with to be faithful, “till death do us part.”

That is why the marriage is the bedrock of civilization and the family is the fundamental unit of freedom. It arises from a covenant that is a promise to “love your neighbor as yourself” and nothing else can lead to a flourishing society.

There are, contra the relativists who enabled Hitler and Mussolini to take over Germany and Italy and who are always the avante garde of tyranny, I say, there are permanent principles rooted in unchanging human nature. The command to love the neighbor is a command to be blessed and fruitful and happy. It is, in God, our only social hope. It is a law of nature.

If students read Latin texts in school instead of the swill we use to impose our relativistic morality on them, they would know that.

This post was originally published at The Gospel Coalition.

A funny thing happened as the 20th century came to a close. A number of Christians began to form what were being called “classical and Christian” schools. Believers who would have been (or were) involved in their local traditional Christian school or public school were suddenly making the case for Latin, reading the great books of the Western intellectual tradition, and talking about the traditional liberal arts—the trivium and the quadrivium.

That question, or one like it, is often asked of homeschoolers. Some parents find the responsibility of educating their own children so great and so intimidating that they can’t even contemplate it.

My answer to the question is “Yep! You bet I’m worried that I am going to blow it!”

But it’s not concerns over my children’s academics that keep me up at night. It’s that other awesome responsibility that I have. The one that God gave me the moment I became a mother. I’m a parent and that means that God has charged me to disciple my children and cultivate their souls. That’s the part that I’m worried I am going to blow.

And that’s why I homeschool.

My children were 6 and 4 when we began homeschooling almost 10 years ago. They attended preschool and kindergarten at a classical school where I taught. I felt good about the education they were receiving. But I didn’t feel so good about our frenzied lifestyle, so we returned home.

I confess it was a shock. I went from seeing my children very little—a rushed breakfast and an equally frantic dinner time, homework, bath and bed routine—and learning about them by reading notes from teachers to being with them all day long every day. And I discovered something: they were little sinners. They had character flaws and bad patterns of behavior that I had never seen. It was overwhelming, not to mention exhausting. I had to correct, and disciple, and instruct.

That’s when I realized that coming home was God’s gift to me. Being with my children in such an intimate and prolonged way allowed me to see into their hearts in a way that I never did when they were in school. Educating my children at home provided me with many—many—opportunities for discipleship and cultivation.  Opportunities that I would have missed if my children had been with some other teacher all day long.

Now, I am not saying that it is impossible to disciple your children if you don’t homeschool. Not at all. But I do think that the task is more difficult. A parent will have to work harder to find those teachable moments. And no doubt some parents do.

But if I am honest, I don’t think I would have been one of those parents. I was clueless when my kids were in school. They brought home good report cards. Their teachers liked them and praised them. And, frankly, that was good enough for me. I am grateful that it wasn’t good enough for God. He yanked me out of my complacency and put my children’s spiritual needs right in front of my face. Even I couldn’t miss it.

So, for me—and people like me—homeschooling makes us better parents by providing daily opportunities for discipleship. Does that scare me? Absolutely! Do I feel the weight of this awesome responsibility? All the time! Can I alleviate this responsibility by sending my kids to school? No!

A formal education is only one part of a child’s discipleship. Whether or not I put my son on a school bus in the morning does not change my duty as a mother. One day I will have to stand before God and give account. I doubt that He will much interested in SAT scores. And, yeah, that scares me.

Seeking advantage is good and honorable, as long as it minds its place. When it replaces the honorable as the ultimate value (as in theories like Pragmatism, Utilitarianism, Progressivism, etc. or in the common practices of the petty tyranny that runs our inner lives as well as the world around us), it becomes both dishonorable and self-deluding.

It becomes self-deluding because the human soul is created for honor and hungers for it like the body hungers for water. Nor is it dishonorable to do so. The question is not whether you should seek honor, but from whom you should seek it. As Jesus asked the Pharisees, “How can you believe when you seek the honor that comes from each other and not the honor that comes from God.”

The quest for honor is the soul’s yearning for the great well done. Our Lord suggests that we believe what we believe based on who we want to honor us, something important to remember when engaged in apologetics. But the utilitarian philosophies that run our political structures and our schools dishonor the quest for honor.

I describe these dual motives because I want to write about why we should study Latin and I’ve been struck by the extent to which its defenders have turned to utility and away from honor.

The argument of those who defend Latin on the basis of its utility is that this is what people care about. I wonder. Watch TV commercials. How many products advertise themselves for the practical advantages you gain from them and not for the honor you’ll get?

Perhaps that is because most product don’t offer any practical advantages (the great exception is power over others, such as sexuality and money) so they have to turn to the pettiest of honors. But let’s set that aside for a moment.

Promised practical benefits or utility are usually the solution to anxiety. I understand that parents are anxious about education. For the most part, we didn’t receive one growing up in spite of the years we spent in school, so we know the scam of schooling intuitively and we also know that in an ever-growing domain of life you have to perpetuate that scam to get a job. This makes us anxious.

But we are still told to be anxious for nothing and that only one thing is needful. Everything changes when we believe that. We are called to faith, not fear. We are called to be “more than conquerors” not timid. Educators speak of transforming our culture, but then we let the culture tell us how to teach. You can’t transform something by conforming to it. Here is one place where it is better to die than to surrender, even as a school.

Back to my point: why study Latin?

We can identify two categories for the reasons to do so, the honorable and the advantageous. These are not in conflict unless the advantageous rises up against the honorable.

For example, children should honor their parents because it is right to do so. That is, it is honorable. And yet, interestingly, this is the first commandment that includes a promise: that it may be well with you and you may inherit the land. In other words, if you do the honorable, you’ll gain advantages. This is not the product of a mechanism that turns inputs into outputs. It is the faithfulness of a promise-keeping God.

So why study Latin? You’ve already been told the advantages: improved language skills, SAT scores, understanding of grammar, college admissions, trained mind, look smart at cocktail parties, put down the big shot who doesn’t know it, etc. Good stuff all. Well, at least, mostly.

But I want to explore the reasons derived from thinking about the topic of honor. There are three, those oriented toward

1. Love of God

2. Love of Neighbor

3. Virtue

I’ll explore each over the next little while.

The key to a Christian conception of studies is the realization that prayer consists of attention. It is the orientation of all the attention of which the soul is capable toward God. The quality of the attention counts for much in the quality of the prayer. Warmth of heart cannot make up for it.

Simone Weil

Four years ago I read Simone Weil’s essay, “Reflections on the Right Use of School Studies with a View to the Love of God” from her classic Waiting for God.

Then in March I sat in on a Friday discussion at Gutenberg College where a young woman bought up Hayek’s essay “Security and Freedom.” She said she had been thinking about security and freedom in the context of public prayer, so we began to talk about public prayer. What is it? What is prayer?

Someone defined prayer as personal, intimate communication with God. Recalling Simone Weil’s essay, I asked if anyone had considered that the perfection of focused study might be prayer… and how does that work?

The dialogue led us to distinguish between meditation and prayer. Maybe meditation is didactic instruction, either to self or group, and prayer is communication with God.

Then we left it.

A few weeks ago I began reading Stratford Caldecott’s Beauty for Truth’s Sake, and because of it, I have returned to Waiting for God.

In his chapter “The Golden Circle,”  Caldecott writes this:

One twentieth-century writer who was adept at translating theology into geometry is Simone Weil, a skilled mathematician (and sister of one of the greatest mathematicians of the twentieth century) as well as a profound religious thinker. Among all those who have studied Pythagorean geometry, she more than any recognized that it is marked deeply by the Trinity, for its central idea is that of mediation (metaxu), which she identifies with the Logos (Son). p. 81

Again, Weil.

So pausing at that point, I turned from my desk to my bookshelf. I needed to return to “Reflections on the Right Use of School Studies with a View to the Love of God.” Pulling Waiting for God from my bookshelf has proven to be pure pleasure.

“Reflections on the Right Use of School Studies with a View to the Love of God” is much more than I remembered it to be, and like every excellent essay, every other line begs to be shared. Yet the most important point is this: the substance of prayer is the faculty of attention. The main goal of teachers and spiritual leaders ought to be the cultivation of the faculty of attention.

Although people seem to be unaware of it today, the development of the faculty of attention forms the real object and almost the sole interest of studies.

Weil writes that only the highest part of the attention makes contact with God; yet, at the same time, school exercises only develop a lower kind of attention. How then can school exercises help students make contact with God?

Weil argues that the efforts of genuine attention in school studies, even if they do not immediately bear fruit, will indeed bear eternal fruit. Sometimes the student will not arrive at the “right answer” at the end of his study, but the effort of truth-seeking promises to develop the faculty of attention, and the virtue will be found in prayer.

If we concentrate our attention on trying to solve a problem of geometry, and if at the end of an hour we are no nearer to doing so than at the beginning, we have nevertheless been making progress each minute of that hour in another more mysterious dimension. Without our knowing or feeling it, this apparently barren effort has brought more light into the soul. The result will one day be discovered in prayer.

As the student longs to discover the ideas embodied in his studies, so he seeks the eternal truths of God. Every truth-seeking effort cultivates the faculty of attention.

Never in any case whatever is a genuine effort of the attention wasted.”  Value exists in the wrestling, even without finding the “right answer.” The effort is not waste because its value is its virtue in the spiritual and intellectual realms of the student. The faculty of attention serves not only the intellectual, but also the spiritual; attending attends to both. Attending cultivates the intellectual realm across subjects. Studying geometry will help one see truth in poetry. Attending to astronomy aids one in perceiving all truth, and seeing truth is spiritual. And when the spirit apprehends truth, the spirit rejoices in pure pleasure.

The key, the turning point, is this pleasure that one receives. When we have tasted the joy of contemplation, we desire more. We hunger and thirst for the ideas of God. We long for truth – eternal, essential truth. As David Hicks notes in Norms and Nobility, engaging with ideas is “the natural motivation for scholarship—the excitement of making connections and of seeing the whole emerge from a relation of parts…” Contemplation is a natural reward and it will truly motivate students.

There is a real desire when there is an effort of attention. It is really light that is desired if all other incentives are absent. Even if our efforts of attention seem for years to be producing no result, one day a light that is in exact proportion to them will flood the soul. Every effort adds a little gold to a treasure no power on earth can take away.

Seek ye first the Logos. All treasures of wisdom and knowledge are hidden there. Lay up for yourselves treasures in heaven.

It is in prayer that the student meets an eternal logos and through attending, apprehends it, and through re-presenting it, names it and releases it back to eternity. In this way, cultivating the faculty of attention has more to do with the process than the product; however, developing the faculty of attention is, in the end, always practical.

The useless efforts made by the Cure d’ Ars, for long and painful years, in his attempt to learn Latin bore fruit in the marvelous discernment that enabled him to see the very soul of his penitents behind their words and even their silences.

The benefits of the virtue of attentive perception are both immediate and eternal.

How can teachers cultivate the faculty of attention in a student?

There are two conditions. First, the teacher must coach his student to never let the goal of prayer out of his sight. The teacher teaches the student to hold to the necessity of wishing to complete a work correctly, “because such a wish is indispensable in any true effort,” while keeping his eye on the idea, the logos.

Second, keeping in mind the virtue of humility, the teacher must tutor towards the unforgiving examination of failure.  The student must learn to look upon and  contemplate his mistakes, “trying to get down to the origin of each fault.”

Above all it is thus that we can acquire the virtue of humility, and that is a far more precious treasure than all academic progress. From this point of view it is perhaps even more useful to contemplate our stupidity than our sin. Consciousness of sin gives us the feeling that we are evil, and a kind of pride sometimes finds a place in it. When we force ourselves to fix the gaze, not only of our eyes but of our souls, upon a school exercise in which we have failed through sheer stupidity, a sense of our mediocrity is borne in upon us with irresistible evidence. No knowledge is more to be desired. If we can arrive at knowing this truth with all our souls we shall be well established on the right foundation.

Weil says that in order to fulfill the second condition, examining his mistakes, one must simply wish to do it, but the first condition, to really pay attention, requires the knowledge of how to set about it.

First, one must not confuse attention with will power. Will power is a muscular effort, an effort that has no place in study.  Drudgery creates fatigue, but attention does not cause weariness.

The will is not run by desire, but attention is encouraged by desire.

The intelligence can only be led by desire. For there to be desire, there must be pleasure and joy in the work. The intelligence only grows and bears fruit in joy. The joy of learning is as indispensable in study as breathing is in running. Where it is lacking there are no real students, but only poor caricatures of apprentices who, at the end of their apprenticeship, will not even have a trade.

The experience of joy is essential. Rejoicing in the impressions of God’s eternal idea(s), the student ambles along the sacred path, never rushing, always musing. Imagining, he does smile; he sings the while. Sweet joy befalls him. Real students are like innocent children, waiting in faith for a promised, beautiful blessing in a place where dignity meets delight.

Second, attention is not hasty; she is longsuffering. She waits. Patiently she opens and empties herself, “ready to receive in its naked truth the object that is to penetrate it.”

All wrong translations, all absurdities in geometry problems, all clumsiness of style, and all faulty connection of ideas in compositions and essays, all such things are due to the fact that thought has seized upon some idea too hastily, and being thus prematurely blocked, is not open to the truth.

Essential truths cannot be mastered; they must be waited upon; they will give of themselves only in their time. Every truth is like the truest of all truths, too refined to be kept in the lower realm. Each truth the student seeks belongs to a higher order, to the heavenly realm. The student must learn to wait for it; honoring one of truth’s essential elements, the faculty of free consent. “We do not obtain the most precious gifts by going in search of them but by waiting for them.”

Right answers are not the most precious gifts, but they reflect the most precious gift, “the very Truth that once in human voice declare: ‘I am the Truth.’”

Every school exercise, thought of in this way, is like a sacrament. In every school exercise there is a special way of waiting upon the truth, setting our hearts upon it, yet not allowing ourselves to go out in search of it.

So what is the main duty of teachers?

In order to teach the first condition of “aiming solely at increasing the power of attention with a view to prayer,” the teacher must teach toward ideas. Charlotte Mason writes, “our business is to give children the great ideas of life…” and the teacher must teach his students to wait. Aiming towards perceiving and incarnating ideas and learning to wait are what will bring students near to God, closer to his eternal truths.

To pray to God is to love him, and to love him is to love one’s neighbor.

Prayer, love of God, and love of neighbor have attention as their substance.

Recalling God’s truths is evidence of the love of God. In order to re-present an idea one must first have perceived the idea by allowing the idea to penetrate. The only way to perceive and allow an idea to penetrate is through cultivating the faculty of attention. Devoted to the art of attention, the perception, penetration, and apprehension of ideas, one can now love one’s neighbor. To love one’s neighbor is to see him. One sees his neighbor, waits upon his neighbor, the same way one sees and waits upon God’s eternal truths.

The effort of attending will pay off in the greater aptitude for grasping eternal truths and then expressing them. Attending helps us see and then speak. As Weil proclaims, maybe the kindest words we can speak to our neighbor are, “What are you going through?” It is this question which embodies a true longing to know our neighbor. To be known might be man’s greatest longing and to seek to know might be the greatest act of love.

No saccharine sentimentality exists in this act of love. The act of cultivating the faculty of attention is the act of cultivating the highest affection. To love God is to pray to him, and the substance of prayer is the faculty of attention.

Prayer is both meditation and communication. “Education, like faith, is the evidence of things not seen.” Prayer is the artifact of watching, waiting attention.

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Kim Jahn is a current CiRCE apprentice. She lives with her family in Rogue River, Oregon.

Carey explains, “Such is our need to imbue our words with force and significance, that we use hyperbole to entice people to pay attention – and the hyperbolic terms gradually normalise.”

The same tendency can be seen in numbers as well. Once giving 110% became cliché, people started insisting that they give 210%, 310%, and on and on. To create even more force behind the phrase, people will also throw in a literally. I literally gave 210%. That’s not numerically possible, of course. What the speaker really means is I worked very hard.

This is no new trend. My generation destroyed words like awesome and totally. My parents and grandparents robbed of meaning words like incredible, wonderful, and fantastic.

C.S. Lewis even warned against language inflation: “Don’t use words too big for the subject. Don’t say infinitely when you mean very; otherwise, you’ll have no word left when you want to talk about something really infinite.”

And this is precisely where we find ourselves right now. We have no words left when we want to say that something truly is awe-inspiring or full of wonder.

This language inflation causes problems not only for speakers and writers, but for readers as well. Robbing words of their true meaning and force makes it all the more difficult for modern readers to connect with older books.

Odysseus had an epic adventure, which means more than just out of the ordinary, and he encountered fantastic creatures, which were more than pretty cool.

Language inflation particularly cheapens our understanding of the Scriptures. Jesus Christ is called wonderful. He is truly full of wonder. The Lord God is awesome. These words have powerful meanings that a modern reader can’t instantly grasp.

As a child of the 80s I was always uncomfortable calling God awesome like my Christian friends did because I knew that they meant something much less by the use of that word than was fitting to God. If my sunglasses are totally awesome, I need some other word for God!

What’s even more disturbing to me is the trend to use negative words positively. In the 80s, bad was good. Two decades later sick was even better.

I suspect that this trend is more than just sloppiness with words. I suspect that this is really a worldview issue as our culture retreats more and more away from Truth, Goodness, and Beauty.  We’ve long preferred ugliness to beauty culturally; it makes sense that our language would reflect that as well. That’s the only way that I can understand how calling something sick is a compliment.

Our souls starve and atrophy in the current culture. We neglect the spiritual aspects of our own being more and more. It makes sense that the language would reflect that as well. Caring primarily for our physical needs, we run across fewer and fewer moments that inspire us with true awe or fill us wonder.  Those emotions would require an encounter with the sublime and the time to contemplate it.

Who’s got the time or the desire for that? We’ll settle for pretty good experiences and call them totally awesome.

Tolkien's monogram, and Tolkien Estate trademark (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

BY ANDREW SEELEY

My family has a standing joke about my talks and articles – no matter what the subject, Papa somehow manages to work Tolkien into every one.  Probably an exaggeration, and I certainly don’t “manage” it; Tolkien’s works have found a privileged place in that central storage of thought and image known as memory or heart or imagination that spontaneously produces connections.   Naturally, then, the theme of this year’s Circe Conference, Creation, could not but make me think immediately of Tolkien.

If the conference were to have a patron, I can imagine none more fitting than Tolkien, for Creation in all its divine and human manifestations dominated his works.  The Creation myth expressed so beautifully in the Ainulindale sets the theme of the Silmarillion – that the One created intelligent beings with a desire to create at the core of their being.  The Quenta Silmarillion portrays the fall of Melkor (Tolkien’s Lucifer figure) and Feanor (the greatest of the Elves) as corruptions of this desire, for each treats their creative inspirations and productions as coming from himself alone.  In one of its most dramatic moments, Feanor is urged to acknowledge that his greatest works, the jewels called the Silmarils, are not his own; yet Aule, one of the angelic powers that governs the world, sympathetically understands the love that binds the maker to his work.

Then Tulkas cried:’Speak O Noldo, yea or nay! But who shall deny Yavanaa? And did not the light of the Silmarils come from her work in the beginning?’   But Aule the Maker said:  Be not hasty! We ask a greater thing than thou knowest. Let him have peace yet awhile.’

Tragically, Feanor had let his heart so rest in his work that he could not see them as a gift given to him for the sake of all, and Feanor, himself one of the greatest works of Iluvatar, is lost.

Tolkien shows a sensitivity to craftsmen of all kinds that seems unusual in a literary man.  The theme of making and possessing that drives the Silmarillion continues into Lord of the Rings through the rings of power, which were conceived by Feanor’s grandson to enhance the power of the Elves to enchant the exterior world according to their own visions of beauty.  Galadriel seems to have achieved this most powerfully in Lothlorien, where even the stream of Time was changed.  For her, as for Elrond, the destruction of the One Ring meant the loss of her heart’s desire, which she could never conceive or attempt again.  In consenting to the loss of her land, she undid her share in Feanor’s rebellion:   “I pass the test… I will diminish, and go into the West, and remain Galadriel.”

Tolkien’s own profound love of making drove him to spend a lifetime making and re-making and shaping the world of the Silmarillion and caused him to feel Feanor’s tragedy and Galadriel’s redemption so deeply.  He considered that his literary works of fantasy were made by the same desire as the craftsman’s, though he poured his heart out for greater object – not merely to make something of this world beautiful but, like the Ainur of his mythology to make an entire cosmos.  Arda, the cosmos of the Silmarillion, was more Tolkien’s creation than the Valar’s (though, perhaps, not than Iluvatar’s).  The story-maker has the power to enchant and draw the mind, heart and imagination into a world of beauty and terror not possible in world of the senses.

Tolkien expressed this understanding of story in his 1947 essay, “On Fairy Stories”.  The essay, along with the companion allegorical story, “Leaf by Niggle”, was published as a small book entitled “Tree and Leaf”, a sine qua non for those who wish to understand Tolkien’s compelling sub-creations and to gain a God’s-eye view of the creative arts.   Having explained that fairy stories are best understood as stories about Faerie, the land of enchantment where elves and dragons are at home, and where many men long to be though they do not belong, Tolkien turns to discuss their origin, which he finds fundamentally in Ianguage itself.

 The incarnate mind, the tongue, and the tale are in our world coeval. The human mind, endowed with the powers of generalization and abstraction, sees not only green-grass, discriminating it from other things (and finding it fair to look on), but sees that it is green as well as being grass. But how powerful, how stimulating to the very faculty that produced it, was the invention of the adjective: no spell or incantation in Faerie is more potent. And that is not surprising: such incantations might indeed be said to be another view of adjectives, a part of speech in a mythical grammar.

The power of abstraction frees the imagination to make new combinations, and awakens a natural desire to imagine how the world might be, and to attempt to bring our imaginings to reality.   Of course, all story-making involves imagining new characters, new situations, (or as Aristotle would say of drama, the possible rather than the actual of history), which develop what might lie within the world that has been created by the Creator of all, and are bounded by the natures that He has made.  But this world is only one of an infinite realm of possible worlds that He might have made.  Fantasy allows the imagination to enter the extra-natural realm of possibilities, to develop new kinds of beings, new kinds of worlds.

When we can take green from grass, blue from heaven and red from blood, we have already an enchanter’s power – upon one plane; and the desire to wield that power in the world external to the mind awakes….In such “fantasy”, as it called, new form is made; Faerie begins; Man becomes a sub-creator.

To create new form demands more than imagination; it demands thoughtful, powerful, inspired control of the wild imagination, which is achieved through art.  This links it with other works of craft, which proceed from imagination through art to creation.  But Fantasy, the name Tolkien gives to his art, encounters no limitations of matter or nature and so is art in its “most nearly pure form”.

Cover of J.R.R. Tolkien

The achievement of the expression, which gives (or seems to give) “the inner consistency of reality,” is indeed another thing [other than Imagination], or aspect, needing another name: Art, the operative link between Imagination and the final result, Sub-creation….That the images are of things not in the primary world (if that indeed is possible) is a virtue, not a vice. Fantasy (in this sense) is, I think, not a lower but a higher form of Art, indeed the most nearly pure form, and so (when achieved) the most potent.

To sub-create in this sense, to make another world, other creatures, which “in living shapes move from mind to mind,” demands great power.   It is not sufficient to produce a “willing suspension of disbelief”, an act of choice to pretend that something matters which really does not; the Fantastic author must enchant his reader into believing his world and his story matter deeply.  He must create an imagined world which is desirable and believable.  If the world lacks “inner consistency”, the mind fails to find satisfaction in exploring the creation, and continually distracts the heart from committing itself to the story.  Like any creator, the fantasy writer must infuse his creation with unity as well as beauty.

Tolkien frequently refers to his art as “elvish”, for the elves have the power to enchant, to make their stories of such texture that “both designer and spectator can enter, to the satisfaction of their senses, while they are inside….” As we see in Tolkien’s Elves, such as Legolas, the sub-creative desire does not withdraw those who enjoy it from the real world, for the elves are ever attentive to the deepest natures of the natural world.  As Treebeard says, “Ents are more like Elves: less interested in themselves than Men are, and better at getting inside other things….” Rather, since “a good craftsman loves his material, and has a knowledge and feeling for clay, stone and wood which only the art of making can give,” so the fantasy maker helps us see with fresh eyes what has become mundane to us.

Which brings us back to the close connection between the literary creator and the craftsman.  All craftsmen and artists share the common drive to imagine the world more beautiful, more powerfully alive, than we find it, and to bring that vision to reality (either primary or secondary).  So Niggle the painter and Alf the baker and Smith the ironmonger, even Parish the gardener, are all employed by Tolkien in stories (“Leaf by Niggle” and “Smith of Wooten Major”) that image the desire of the fairy story maker.  Perhaps it is best exemplified by the friendship of Legolas and Gimli.  The dwarves are craftsman par excellence; they are man’s expression of his desire, his love of making and material and artifact.  Deeply moved by the Caves of Aglarond, Gimli expresses the craftsman’s love for his material:

No dwarf could be unmoved by such loveliness. None of Durin’s race would mine those caves for stones or ore, not if diamonds and gold could be got there. Do you cut down groves of blossoming trees in the springtime for firewood? We would tend these glades of flowering stone, not quarry them.

Yet dwarves are temperamentally opposed to the makers of stories woven with words and consisting in mere imagination.  They do not see that Elves, though more contemplative in their regard for things, love their stories and what inspires them in the same way.  Gimli begins to understand the Elves when he experiences Galadriel’s sympathetic understanding for him, and he finds in her an object of loveliness that he cannot make buy only enjoy.   From then on, he is open to the wonders of Lothlorien, and becomes fast friends with Legolas.

Tolkien, sub-creator par excellence, who shared the passion of elf and dwarf, of author and maker, no doubt experienced also the central temptation – to cling to the product as one’s own.  He must have wondered to what extent his passion, so central to his being, was a matter of pride or an inspiration from God.  He invented the term, sub-creation, to express the metaphysical connection between the human and divine senses of creation, which the creator must embrace if he is to properly exercise his gift.

“Man, Sub-creator, the refracted light

Through whom is splintered from a single White

To many hues, and endlessly combined

In living shapes that move from mind to mind.”

When the human creator embraces his role, his sub-creations become consolations in the trials of this world and he can dream that they will become vehicles for preparing the mind and heart for the fullest experience of Creation in the next life.  “Leaf by Niggle” ends with supernatural “Voices” remarking on the merits of the world that Niggle had spent his life painting.

It is proving very useful indeed,” said the Second Voice. “As a holiday, and a refreshment. It is splendid for convalescence; and not only for that, for many it is the best introduction to the Mountains. It works wonders in some cases. I am sending more and more there. They seldom have to come back.

Tolkien knew the redemptive instrumentality of faerie stories and myths personally.  The poem cited above was addressed to CS Lewis under the pseudonym, “Misomythus”, which means, “Myth-hater”.  Beguiled by the dominant scientific “just the facts, Ma’am,” attitude, Lewis, not yet a Christian, did not at that time (1931) realize how deeply truthful the myths that he loved were.  Tolkien persuaded Lewis that the beauties that touched his soul so deeply as a young man were akin to the divine, thus becoming an instrument in the re-birth of one of the English-speaking world’s greatest evangelists and myth-makers.

For 20 years, Dr. Seeley has been a tutor at Thomas Aquinas College in California, where his love has been teaching and learning with his fellow faculty and students from the greatest minds of Western Civilization. A 1987 graduate of Thomas Aquinas, Dr. Seeley received his Licentiate from the Pontifical Institute in Medieval Studies (Toronto) and a Ph.D. in Medieval Studies from the University of Toronto (1995). Desiring to share his love of learning, in 2005 Dr. Seeley became Executive Director at the Institute for Catholic Liberal Education.  He has spoken at conferences, led in-service workshops, offered consultations to schools and colleges and directed the Institute’s Annual Academic Retreat for Teachers. 

Recently, I had the privilege of being able to chat with former Augustine student and current employee, Landon Coleman, about what makes Augustine unique. Here is what he said.

First of all, what drew you to Augustine College in the first place? What stood out about it when you were considering your college choices? 

I was drawn to Augustine College because I sensed that their vision of education was an alternative to the education being pursued by my peers and encouraged by my high school teachers. When I heard that Augustine College was founded and taught by Christian university professors who were dissatisfied with the secularism, relativism and plummeting standards of post-secondary education I knew that Augustine College must be an interesting place.

How was your experience there different than what most college students would know? 

I’ve found that most students follow one of two paths during their post-secondary education: either they use their time in university solely as a training ground for their career and become super-specialized technicians. Or they indulge in the educational buffet set before them at university, learning little bits of knowledge that don’t quite fit together and walk away from their degree with a bad case of relativism and no job prospects.

Neither of these paths have much to do with a Christian understanding of education (or the original intent of the university). My education at Augustine College was important for me because it bore fruit in my life. It was useful, and not only in helping me pursue a career. I read the classics and through that (often grueling) experience learned to think about concepts like virtue, evil, love, sex, justice, community and truth. Those are all concepts that I actually have to apply in my life. I learned to read and think critically, how to love God with my mind by being intellectually honest, and how to live in community. Compared to the two institutions I had attended before and the one after, it was by far the best, most challenging, and most Christian post-secondary educational experience.

What were your favorite courses at Augustine? 

One of the unique aspects of Augustine College is that everyone follows the same curriculum (except they can choose between Latin or Greek) over the 8-months. Within that set curriculum, my favorite courses were “The History of Philosophy” and “Art in the Christian West”.

Are there any things about Augustine that you think perspective students should know that might not show up in a marketing document or campus visit? 

The student body at the College is quite small (20-25) and one aspect that might not be evident even on a visit is the quality of the relationships that develop throughout the year, not only amongst the students, but between our faculty, staff, alumni and students. The staff, faculty, and many of the alumni are quite involved in the lives of the students and vice versa. These relationships are essential for further discussion of the topics broached in class, the personal development of the students and the strength and integrity of the College community.

From your perspective, what does the future of Augustine look like? 

We pray for God’s will to be done at Augustine College. From my perspective the College will continue to serve the 20-25 students that come to Ottawa each year, but I would like to see the College have a more active and robust presence on the web in the next few years. Augustine College lectures have recently been put up on Youtube and that type of work seems to be quite relevant.

To learn more about Augustine College visit their website. 

Assessment may be just a tool but it is a tool that tries to master us and often succeeds. I have seen this play itself out in the homeschool community and I am pretty sure that classical Christian schools are also driven, against their very mission, to bow to this god of the age.

The history of the homeschooling movement illustrates this.  When the modern homeschooling movement began not too many parents were worried about test scores.  Many early pioneer homeschool families used homeschooling as a way for mom and dad to repair their broken educations while protecting their children from the early stages of cultural decline.  Everyone in the family was learning together, not to prepare for the SATs but just for the fun of it.

A funny thing happened as families were reading, thinking and growing together- test scores went up. Homeschoolers started to score higher than public and private schools in national averages.  The collected homeschool conscious seemed to say, “If we are doing this well without even trying, imagine how amazing we could be if we tried even harder?”   We began to keep one eye on the mirror.  Our focus shifted slightly away from reading, thinking and learning to proving ourselves.  Where once homeschoolers were defined by all the good books they were reading, now they are defined by what program they are using.  The pressure is on to get our kids in what we think are the most prestigious programs and/or co-ops. We are spending our time, lots and lots of it, in a mad dash to be educated while forgetting the one thing needful to true education -time to think.  Our children have all the answers and none of the questions.

This is the very problem Classical Christian education should be able to solve. David Hicks, in his best-seller (at least among all my friends), Norms and Nobility, says: “The formation of a mature person who loves inquiry that reaches into earthly as well as transcendent realms of knowledge, who makes the connection between this knowledge and his responsibility in the life of virtue, and who struggles against long odds to fulfill in himself the high exigencies of the Ideal Type.”

Long odds? Not just for the regular child but for the little genius also. Reminds me of the Gospel of Jesus Christ where we find out that all have sinned, even the good people. Education is not about how smart we are?  Just as the Gospel is frustrating to the self-righteous, true education is frustrating to the intellectual elite.

One of my saddest parenting/teaching mistakes occurred when I expressed, what I thought was mild disappointment over one of my son’s SAT scores. The scores were good but I wanted “gooder”. I had started to feel things were going well in our little school and my students were getting bigger, better, and smarter. I made the mistake of making the test scores all about me.  My intuitive son saw right through my little act and was deeply hurt; something I did not know for years.

Since that sad day I have learned a few things because while no one is testing me, I am still learning and growing. One of my happiest lessons has been that the beginning is not the end.  I have learned that test scores can never measure a child. I have learned that even though my children don’t always respond to truth, beauty, and goodness when presented, that does not mean those things aren’t working their way into their souls.  You would not believe the things my older boys appreciate and remember when I thought they were not even trying.

Ecclesiastes 3:11 “He has made everything beautiful in its time. Also, he has put eternity into man’s heart, yet so that he cannot find out what God has done from the beginning to the end.”  

The Bible is full of this idea that we are not in this thing for the moment but for a lifetime. “Better is the end of a thing than its beginning, and the patient in spirit is better than the proud in spirit.” Ecc. 7:8. So there you have it. Don’t be prideful about your school, your homeschool or your little genius and don’t despair either. Be patient.  Remember that the best fruit needs time to ripen, time in the sun.  It is patient faithfulness that will bring our children to the finish line, not the mad dash or our pushing and prodding. The Beginning is not the End. Assess accordingly.

Having been a runner since high school, the miles on foot did not concern me, but this cycling thing was quite new, from the dozen-plus gears to the ridiculous shorts.  On this particular day, all went swimmingly early on.  My first run was complete and, even at 12 miles into the bike leg, I had plenty of energy.  Then I heard the haunting sound: “Psssssssshhhhh…flub, flub, flub.”  My front tire went flat.

The flat came just as I prepared to turn back for the last downhill portion of the course.  It would have been the easiest part of the day, but it also meant I was four miles from my car.  Walking my bike along the highway took considerably longer than riding it, and I did not have the benefit of the wind in my face.  The heat grew more intense and my water bottle was dry.

After returning to my car, I strapped up the carrier again and foolishly set off to complete my two-mile run.  I finished it, but at great cost.  Thrown off by the flat tire and preoccupied with getting my bike back to the car, I neglected to take in enough fluids to keep me going and I became seriously dehydrated.  My head hurt, my vision went a bit fuzzy, and the world spun while I sat in my car.  The small cooler of Gatorade in the front seat was my savior and only after two bottles was I steady enough to drive home.

Lesson learned: You cannot continue to put out what you have not taken in.

If you happen to be in the midst of multi-sport training, this is important advice.  But in the more likely chance you are a teacher or homeschooling parent reading this, it is no less important.  It is mid-April and the bulk of us are running on fumes.  Your student(s) may have no idea what you are talking about today, but rest assured they know how many days remain before summer.  Of course, the only difference between students and teachers at this point is that teachers have to conceal some of their exhaustion and excitement.  We still have discussions to guide, papers to grade, tests to prepare, and lectures to deliver.

Most of us are dehydrated and we don’t realize it until the serious symptoms show up.  We push and push, run and run, until our heads hurt, our vision goes fuzzy, and the world is spinning.  Papers pile up, patience wears thin, and enthusiasm wanes.  What happened?  For me, the problem is almost always the same.  I try to give out while failing to take in.

In my experience, this is a particularly serious issue for classical school teachers and homeschooling parents because so many lack the funds and opportunities for teacher training and development.  But, we must all quickly learn that you cannot teach great books without basking in them yourself.  You cannot guide moving conversations without having them yourself.  You cannot feed the souls of your students while starving your own.