Enculturation Cont'd / Praise Music

From the email archives, dated Dec. 16, 2002 —

Howdy all, from Kansas City! I’m three days into town and house hunting. Whew, what a tiring thing. I’m taking a break from squinting at newspaper ads and web sites and trying to catch up with my mail. This has been an interesting discussion, I see! K, I totally empathize with you about the difficulty of this question, and it has been on my mind a lot over the last few months as I’ve considered the problem of “diversity” between and among Christian denominations and in the cultures they inhabit.

I guess for me, the question is not “whether” to enculturate, but how. I don’t believe we can discard our earthen vessels while we yet remain on earth! It is a given, that as created beings we are creatures and part of creation. We cannot escape language, culture, art, music, philosophy, and all those other things that go to make us up as unique human persons, families, communities and societies. I rather expect that God made us this way. =) We are supposed to be enculturated beings. We are supposed to be a lot more than that! Our metaphysical existence melts into our physical existence melts into our biological existence melts into our social existence melts into our unique families and personalities. In short, human beings are complicated wholes, and our Christianity ought to reflect that complexity by infusing each and every one of the varied dimensions of our existence. Each of those dimensions was created GOOD, and ought not to be abandoned.

So that’s the first “given” for me. Creation, as originally designed, is beautiful, complex, and good. Now, does that mean I’m in favor of contemporary worship music, as the article we’ve been reading concludes? Nope. Why? Because, to draw on the other fundamental tenet of the Christian view of creation, it is fallen. Each one of those dimensions of created existence has been affected by the Fall, and therefore needs to be healed and restored. What Christianity does — what the Church does — is to effect that restoration as far as possible before God will finally become All in all, at the end of time. As Christians we’re not supposed to take our existence as given. And certainly not our culture as given! Perhaps one might say we should take the “good parts” and try to improve upon them, but it might be more accurate to say that we are supposed to combat all those elements of our existence that prevent us from full communion with God and full healing (even if they are basic, necessary and good in and of themselves), and to transform ALL earthly elements into “signs” or “symbols” (vehicles) of God Himself and His love in and for creation. One of my favorite theologians wrote a book called World as Sacrament. [This was the original title of Fr. Schmemann’s For the Life of the World.] This is what I think sacramental theology is all about, making all of creation into a place where God can dwell.
It starts in our minds and hearts, and flows out of our inner being into everything we are, everything we touch, and everyone we know. It affects all worldly things, good, bad, and neutral. It even affects good things. So we fast, for example. Food is intrinsically good and necessary to our biological existence, but if it replaces the spiritual sustenance we can get only from God Himself, or if our physical dependence upon it weakens us spiritually, then we need some training to put our loyalties back on the right track. I would imagine the same goes for all other good things, including art, music, language, reason, culture, and all other dimensions and necessities of human existence. Each of these is a good part of our lives, but each needs to be “trained” and used as an important “tool” for reaching out to God Himself. Each needs to be transformed into a sign or symbol or vehicle of God, who is Absolute and beyond all culture, beyond all creation. This is exactly what Christ does. He takes all of humanity, including all of his own culture and life, into Himself, into God Himself. He is truly God, and yet, at the same time, truly man. That’s the incarnational mystery of our faith — and of Christmas! =D

So, for me, the conclusion is that of course we need the world, we need to enculturate, we need to be “contemporary”. We have to be ALIVE! If we lived only in the past, we would be dead. But at the same time, creation is fallen and needs to be transformed. It needs to be slowly transfigured into its true form — a True, Good, and Beautiful form — as it was envisioned by its Creator. (As good as creation is now, it is not what it is supposed to be. It is paradoxically both good and fallen/corrupt/sick.) It needs to find its way into Christ. This looks to the future. It will be a long, slow, painful process, with many fits and starts. There are no guarantees, either. Christians believe in possible progress, not inevitable progress. And yet it all can end at any time; there is an urgency that should not be lost track of. But it will not end, can not end, until Christ comes again. Now we ask: is contemporary “praise music” (and the culture, psychology, worship, theology, etc. that goes along with it), pleasing to God? Is it in the image of God? Is it what God envisions for us? I don’t think the question should be posed primarily as an evangelical one. It is not primarily a human-oriented question. Our discernment should not be made based on how it pleases us, or how it pleases the unevangelized masses around us. Our pleasure centers are exceedingly skewed and messed up and are poor judges. It would not be going too far to consider them the devil’s playground! We are filled with fallen dependencies. The question for me is whether what we Christians do, the way we arrange our worship (and all the rest of our lives, including private worship and prayer), brings Christ, a perfect divinization of humanity and humanization of divinity, into our midst. This, to me, is the criterion. When Christ comes, when God is here with us, evangelism and salvation happen. Period. They happen. God here, with us, saves. Emmanuel. We carry what we have received in our Christian worship of God out into the world. If we are missionaries, we carry God with us wherever we go. Christians carry Him into new languages, philosophies, societies, cultures, musical forms, and everything else, as human cultures evolve and as families and peoples travel and migrate. But it is One Presence. That’s what unifies, in space and in time. Christians across the world recognize each other, even with their cultural differences. Christians across time recognize each other, even with their historical differences. Non-Christians come to see the living saints and are confronted by the joy and peace, love and other Christian virtues they encounter. They begin to seek this same truth, beauty, goodness, and love for themselves — and then preaching ensues to share the gospel with those who have “seen the great light” in the followers of Christ.

In general, today’s American culture is filled with incredibly hedonistic, individualistic, tasteless, irrational, consumeristic, dependent and obsessive things. All of these are things that separate us from God. How could we possibly want to compromise with them!? They are desperate attempts, failing and failed attempts, at replacements for God — i.e. idols. They are false gods and false ends for human persons and human cultures. Therefore, they ought to be abandoned, confronted, transformed. If they are so dropped and changed, they (or what replaces them) WILL be profoundly pleasing, in a spiritual sense, to all those who are longing for God, both believers and unbelievers, because God will be seen and heard (sensed, known) through them. If God is (allowed to be) THERE, those who are seeking Him will find Him. I firmly believe that most all people ARE seeking. (Most are incredibly lost, too, of course.) Most will wander about for years on end, but God will find a moment when they become one of “those who can hear”. If the Church is there, if God is with the people, then seekers will have that chance to hear. It is not always for the Church to go out after them when people are not ready. St. Paul, the great apostle, went around to town after town, went out into all the world, but he never “went after” people (except the Jews, whom he expected to be able to hear). Those came to him whom God gave to hear when he was there. As some came, and then told their families and friends (the Samaritan woman), more came. Eventually whole nations were converted when apostles and saints visited them, showed great power and great love, and shined a great light into darkness. These saints were unafraid to actively confront idols and darkened minds and cultures. (St. Boniface always comes to mind.) The situation is no different with us. It is our job to be saints first. That is a tremendously difficult calling, but only then, only as we constantly make that attempt, are we here for all those who seek, and do we take our God with us wherever we go, wherever God sends us. People come to Christianity incredibly willingly when they encounter a saint! Our worship, then, must be to God, must connect us to Him in the most intimate way possible, in every dimension of our beings, way deep down. Then our light shines out to the world, including out to all those who are lost and groping. For me, this requires the holiest Divine Liturgy (liturgy means “work” — I think of it as being “in training” to be with God) I can find. I don’t want appeals just to my emotional or pleasure-seeking side, which I know is warped. I want it ALL, metaphysics, physics, biology, culture, personhood — the richest, most beautiful, most truly human and, simultaneously, most truly divine — worship I can find. Every part of me needs constant conversion into Christ.

Some over-lengthy rambles on a Sunday night…… :o)

At the Bottom of the Well

Someone responded to my “gravity wells” of history idea, and here is my response back.

So are you saying, N, that even as we are all attracted, by our various faith traditions, into different gravity wells of history (“strong attractors” was my other choice of metaphor!), as we dig further down into those wells, we hit a common underlying pool of Truth, from which a common culture and shared assumptions can come? Hmmmmm, could be! A very interesting idea, in fact; though I suspect you would find argument in some Christian quarters about it. To put it in somewhat more extreme terms, I wonder if such a view would extend to secular and non-Christian wells? Does Truth underlie all wells?? In this case, I’m sure you would find argument in many Christian quarters!

It is a tricky problem, because we do all believe (don’t we?) in an underlying Truth which surpasses all human cultural and historical knowledge and experience, and yet, most of us still do believe that some (usually one) faith tradition, culture, or historical period gives closer access to that Truth than all others. Further, we would tend not to believe that the one giving closest access was only a matter of personal needs or proclivities, so that even if there is only one right way for me, there would still be a (different) right way for you. No, even though there is common underlying Truth, some wells are — objectively speaking — better than others. So we believe. Or we wouldn’t take our differences in religion so seriously.

And yet… back on the other side again, we do know that God, who is everywhere, works on each of us differently, because here we all are, with our differences, all of us Christians of good will seeking His Truth, each in our own way. This would seem to be the deep, dark problem of modern pluralism (and ecumenism) in a nutshell. Exactly.

Gravity Wells

IF you take classical education to be largely about enculturation (at the so-called grammar stage), and IF we agree that the culture of contemporary America isn’t “it”, and if we all agree that we want to find Classical Christian culture, then where — historically — do we find it?

The original context for this post being a classical education email list limited to Christian homeschoolers (ecumenical), my assumption was that people would be looking for classical and Christian culture. Outside this context, the assumption may not apply. One might need an apology for class ed in the first place — which I won’t try to offer here.

I remember a conversation a long while back about how to define Christian classical education, and I was amazed at how quickly we ran into theological/denominational differences. As I am reminded about it now I realize that if the enculturation view is right, the way one enculturates (ought to enculturate), at bottom, goes according to one’s religious heritage. And since each of our Christian heritages lie in different “gravity wells” of history, then that affects not only how we study language, but also how we study history — and how we define the content of Christian classical education.

Whew. That was a mouthful. It’d probably take me a month of Sundays to work out all the details! But it sure brings a lot of things into better focus. It also takes a lot of the wind out of a chronological approach to teaching history, at least any sort of equal time chronological approach. (Which is just as well, because I don’t see how you can possibly do it ALL. You’d only get superficiality.) That is, of course you can teach history in chronological order — if not the whole of it, then whatever period you happen to be studying — but you won’t teach all history equally. Not every culture, not all history has equal cultural value. You have to find the gravity wells that give you the Christian classical culture YOU need for your family. For some, this is Counter-Reformation Jesuit education, which melds the classical tradition coming out of the Middle Ages and Renaissance with the emergence of modern European science. For Reformed Christians, and all Protestants, modern history is going to be much more important. For some Catholics, it may be the monasticism/Thomism of the Middle Ages. For Eastern Orthodox, they are likely to go back to Late Antiquity and the patristic period and/or Byzantium and/or their Orthodox Russian or Eastern European roots. For evangelicals with a providential view of American history, and a strong sense of their own American roots, they may dwell more in American history. (Politically-minded Baptists like at HSLDA, and Reformed folks like George Grant, also see a lot of value in American history.) Laura Berquist (Catholic) does a lot with the history of modern European Catholic countries like France, Spain, and England (where Catholicism runs alongside Protestantism for centuries).

All western classical streams — including all, or most, of the Christian ones — look back, culturally speaking, to ancient Greece and Rome. So I don’t think anybody can fail to include some significant study of ancient history. And yes, that includes coming to serious grips with the language prescription of learning Latin and Greek. As Christians, none of us can afford to omit biblical history, and the history of the early Church. But after that, or in addition to that, how much time you spend in any one gravity well will probably be determined by other factors.

Don’t ask me how that all ought to work out in terms of 12 years, or history cycles, or what. But it may give some sort of a principle to work from.

Enculturation

Not exactly a light beginning, but here’s something from my email archives. To put an Orthodox cast on it, how does the Church come into a new culture, like the Slavic, or Alaskan, or 21st century American?

A question for you ladies. Where does the learning of an indigenous language fit in a classical curriculum? I’m asking from NZ and the reason for my question is that I have been learning Maori language in a small way for several years and it is something I would like to expand to include the children more. I’m a mere beginner in learning about class. ed. and I’m loving the wisdom that comes from you folk but I can see TIME constraints looming! If you were to include the learning of an indigenous language, (would you include this?), what if anything would you drop from your existing programme. Any insight will be gratefully received. TIA Sue.

Hi Sue,

GREAT question. =) Now, I’m about to say something “heretical” (classical heretical, not Christian heretical, don’t panic!), so don’t say I didn’t warn you! =)

I am slowly coming around to the opinion (and it’s only that) that what “grammar” is all about in a classical education is the “enculturation” of the young into the language, literature, history, and general culture of their own people. The first step of a classical education is to make the children culturally literate — in the broadest sense of that term (maybe even a Hirschian sense).

The reference is to E.D. Hirsch, the proponent of cultural literacy. See his New Dictionary of Cultural Literacy and the series What Your __ Grader Needs to Know. Classically educating homeschoolers these days tend to see the trivium arts of grammar, logic, and rhetoric as three age-appropriate “stages” of learning. On that, see the essay by Dorothy Sayers, “The Lost Tools of Learning”. My own critique of this essay (which could stand to be rewritten!) may be found here: part 1 and part 2. My class ed “heresy” is in proposing a quite different view from Sayers of the trivium art of grammar.

In ancient times, children were taught both skills and content at the same time. Indeed the skills were drawn from the specific cultural content and enabled the student to deal with that content. The skills of reading, writing, prosody, memorization, etc. were all taught using the literature, poetry, and history that formed the literary (and religious) core of their culture. Obviously, this sort of enculturation would continue for life, but at a foundational level, it was prerequisite to all further artistic (i.e. productive) work — learning the art of oratory so they could involve themselves in politics (being leaders of their people); learning medicine, law, or some other profession; studying philosophy (including what we today would call science); and writing literature, poetry, or history themselves (i.e. contributing further to the literary culture themselves).

Classical education arose in Greece, so it was the Greek language and literature which young people learned first. When Greek culture began to flow into Rome, the Roman youth at first learned Greek and studied Greek culture because their own culture was relatively undeveloped. But soon the Romans became consumed by the passion to develop their own LATIN culture. Soon there were Latin poets, dramatists, historians, orators, and philosophers. There was Cicero to rival Demosthenes and Vergil to rival Homer.

Later in time, when there was a revival of classical ideas in the Renaissance, what happened shortly thereafter? The rise of the national literatures and languages. Dante began to write in Italian, Chaucer consolidated the “new” English (with Norman influences), and Shakespeare became the master of English. In the other European nations, national languages began to arise among the literate classes, and the first native-language epics and Great Books began to appear about the same time.

The point is that classical education as enculturation stimulates the rise of particular cultures.

Now, to be sure, [even during the time of the rise of national European cultures] Greek and Latin were still “the” classics. The new national languages and cultures were either derived immediately from Latin (Italian, Spanish, French, and all the Romance languages) or they gained their post-Renaissance, enriched form by exposure to the Latin and Greek, often via intermediate influences — for example, Anglo-Saxon via Nordic, Germanic, and especially French. So Greek, and especially Latin, became the roots, and all the new European languages became the branches and new shoots. But still, the point was to develop culture, and that meant to develop rich language.

I recently posted an article by Thomas Babington Macaulay (a 19th c. English historian, poet, and politician) that addressed this very question. What did the British do about the “language situation” in India when it was under the British Empire? Macaulay argued strenuously at that time (and his position became British policy — his rhetoric was totally effective) that the language of education in British India ought to be English because English was culturally superior. Today, of course, you would hear the opposite, in a multiculturalist’s view, that the native peoples ought to be allowed to use their own native languages, and not be imposed upon by colonial imperialists. (Macaulay’s opponents were also advocates of a pro-native view.) Personally, I think this is a tricky problem which goes right to the heart of what a classical education is all about, because as evidenced by the Romans and the rise of the European languages and cultures, what you really want is BOTH. You want your language to be culturally rich, but you also want it to be YOUR language. You want to appropriate, into your own culture, all the myriad and rich forms of thought and expression you can get. This is what gives the gift of penetrating thought, of persuasive speech and writing, and of an ability to learn from history, and from the greatest thinkers of all time through the Great Books — the Great Books of whatever long tradition you stand in, be it Hebrew, Christian, Greek, Roman, English, Chinese, Indian, or some combination of these.

Perhaps the task of classical students in the next generations out from us will be to become competent in two or more of these long traditions. Something like this was happening in 19th century Europe’s interest in the Far East (and native America) before it got cut off by hyper-nationalistic politics and new educational ideals. In any case, it is the access to culture that forms the foundation of a classical education. (IMO)

Now, in the case of Maori language and culture, you have an interesting question. What is Maori culture? My understanding is that there is a rich Maori culture (and language), unusually so for an aboriginal people, but that it is primarily non-literary, i.e. non-written. Is that correct? If so, then you will have to adapt classical philosophy and methods to cope with that major difference. It is also extremely non-Western in mindset, isn’t it? Another major challenge. Also relevant would be to ask about the scope, intrinsic value, and pragmatic usefulness of Maori language and culture relative to English, Latin or Greek (or whatever other language tradition you might be interested in), just as Macaulay asked about Arabic/Sanscrit for the Indian case. (You don’t necessarily need to come to Macaulay’s conclusion.) Finally, what other influences have there been on Maori language and culture? Was it formed into its present shape by melding with some other linguistic or cultural influence(s), as English was formed between the Norman Conquest and the English Renaissance? Is Maori in such a melding process today? With what effect? I would think that, potentially, the Maori case would offer fascinating possibilities, as well as tremendous (insurmountable?) challenges.

So I don’t have any answer for you, Sue, but that is one way, at least, of looking at it through a classical (probably a “heretical” classical) lens. Let us know what you decide! I would be interesting in hearing more.

P.S. The other possibility, of course, would be to simply learn it for “fun”, i.e. not as part of your classical core. There’s nothing wrong with that either, depending on your time available and priorities. =)

Education as Encounter

Fr. Michael, a good priest I know and a dedicated pastor to children, talks about the difference between information and formation. The goal of Christian education is not to provide information to young Christians but to form them. How does that work? Does it mean there is nothing passed from teacher to student? Who does the forming? Formation into what?

It seems there IS something passed from teacher to student, and that is God Himself, or His love, or a lived knowledge of Him — participation in His Life. How is God Himself passed from teacher to student?

First off, St. Basil is right, not Dunn (from our earlier discussion). Training in virtue is far more important than getting “foundational beliefs” right. The prerequisite of virtue applies to both teacher and student. Why? Because virtue allows a teacher to convey God, and virtue allows a student to receive God.

For the teacher, the goal is to become a prism — or a mirror, or an image, if you prefer — a focal medium for God to “shine through”. No teacher can offer wisdom or truth or love except he offer God Himself (the “energies” of God). This need not be some awe inspiring mystical display, like Moses come down from the mount. It may be entirely humble, less explicitly “visible”. But to convey God is still the goal. To become a prism through which God may shine, however humbly, requires virtue, a harmonizing of the soul, as Plato would put it, the cultivation of beauty. God possesses — as must we — a love of beauty: philokalia. He looks for beauty in us just as we can find (and reflect) it from Him Who is Beauty itself. “Be thou holy as the Lord Thy God is holy.” Holiness is purity, loveliness, nobility, goodness — beauty (kalos in Greek). A prism to reflect God is formed in the soul of a teacher who grows in virtue and inner beauty. God Himself takes up an abode and from there can be conveyed to a student by encounter. This is what students seek in their education — an Encounter. They do not seek to be stuffed full of information or concepts or ideas. They want to meet someone (Someone) from whom to receive good things, someone by whom to be formed.

The student requires virtue to receive just as the teacher does to convey. A student must be open, yielding, teachable. An old word for the quality is: docile from the Latin docere, to teach. He must be able to discipline himself sufficiently to pay attention to someone besides himself, to want something other than immediate comfort, to care about the possibility of a life outside his own present feelings and opinions. A docile student is not constantly spewing forth from within himself but rather has recognized a lack or need that he isn’t sure how to fill. He looks to another to help him define what it is he does desire, or ought to desire, in the first place. A student is a person ready to reform his basest passions and replace them with better ones.

I have always been highly skeptical that children can learn virtue by being brought up to “obey the rules”. (Compare the view of virtue as forming a good habit.) It’s not that rules and the regulation of behavior by rules and punishments and good habits aren’t important, especially when it comes to safety and basic participation in family and social life. Kids must learn to conform, it’s true. But such “behavior modification” need not necessarily touch their hearts. It does not give them a treasure worth seeking (to use one of Fr. Schmemann’s favorite biblical metaphors). In fact, some kids, if conformed too much against their will, wind up in nothing but rebellion against all rules (rules as such). Often as not, they come to a tragic end. Other kids, at the opposite extreme, learn to find approval only in conformity, and will go through life seeking the standards of others (“the rules”) and the approval of others all their lives, with attendant worry and guilt whenever they aren’t able to measure up. Still other kids will begin to differentiate between the rules and to select which of them lead to pleasure and which to pain. They set up an arbiter to help them pick and choose between rules they like and those they don’t like. Without guidance, they pick to satisfy a base passion. (They will also seek to legislate good-feeling rules for all and to destroy bad-feeling ones from out of society.)

Rebels, goodie two-shoes, and hedonists — no student of any of these types is docile. A docile child wants higher desires. Like the rebel, he is not satisfied with mere obedience and conformity to everyday standards. He wants to know what he’s doing. He wants knowledge, and love. Like the goodie two-shoes the docile child feels bad when he is unable to measure up — but he questions the standard of measure. Like the hedonist, the docile student wants to find an arbiter of rules, but he recognizes the need for arbitration by something better than pleasure and pain. He wants what is higher, not what is base. A docile child seeks out and wants to be given higher desires. If I am right, this is the student St. Basil imagines can be formed by selectively studying the pagan classics, which, for all their faults, sought out and valued higher things. The docile student is the student who is ready for an Encounter, an Encounter a prismatic teacher can give him. He is ready for God Himself, and the Gospel.

No human being can have a higher desire than a desire for God Himself. The docile student is ready to be formed (to help form himself) into an image, a prism, a likeness of God when he is ready to receive God from such an Encounter and is privileged enough to have a teacher who can give it to him.

Basil or Dunn?

I have recently, a little reluctantly, opted to use Angelicum Academy’s Study Guides for the Great Books as a crutch in teaching my high schoolers. I really want to write my own GBs curriculum, Orthodox not Catholic, including the Church Fathers and not just the secular/western Great Books, inclusive of both trivium art as method and the “method” of the saints for spiritual growth (saintly art). But alas, the days are only so long. Not to mention, I utterly lack competence.

In surfing around Angelicum, I found their articles page, which has a few good things on it. A perennial favorite is St. Basil’s Address to Young Men (or see here for a better formatted version). I’ve had occasion to discuss Basil’s educational philosophy before on this blog. Basically, Basil thinks the pagan classics perfectly appropriate for study as a sort of propaideia, i.e. preliminary education. The pagan classics, judiciously selected (as a bee selects nectar from the flowers it visits), are a prompt to virtue, which then leads the student naturally into the Christian gospel.

Another essay on the Angelicum site, by Dunn, has a different approach. Note the foundationalism of the epistemology - i.e. make sure your kid has his key assumptions (foundational truths) right, and then feed him anything, being careful to point out truth from error. On this recommendation, sacred texts come first.

So, early training in virtue or early training in foundational truths? What do you think, Basil or Dunn?

Humanism & Christianity

I am again pondering the great problems of Christian education in preparation for teaching this fall. Well, I should say, I’m trying to try to inspire myself to get up the gumption to start planning to teach this fall.

Today I ran across this article by the eminent Catholic historian Christopher Dawson entitled Christianity and the Humanist Tradition. It has a Catholic flavor to it, but his insights penetrate deeply into history and culture. Be sure to read all the way through to the last two sections.

What happens if you think about it in terms of my previous post, The Orthodox Are Coming! but putting a cultural cast on it rather than a political one?

Here are a few choice quotes from Dawson. He does an excellent analysis of Protestant vs. Catholic, northern European vs. southern European humanism. I would consider it essential reading for anyone heading into homeschooling waters and needing to deal with curriculum bias.

Although Catholics and Protestants were both alike influenced by their humanist education, it produced different fruits in art and culture and life in the different spiritual environments.

One might ask what fruits humanism would produce in an Orthodox spiritual environment.

First as rivals, then as mistress and servant, then as rivals again, but sometimes as friends and coadjutors, these two great traditions [humanism and Christianity] have together been the conscious spiritual and intellectual sources of Western culture.

Today both of them are threatened, and threatened on the whole by the same enemies, but both still exist, and as long as they exist Europe still survives.

The average Christian does not realize how much his moral outlook is conditioned by humanist influences.

It is no doubt possible to find examples of non-humanist Christianity that are more admirable…, but they are a long way away. Perhaps the best example I can quote is that of the Archpriest Avakkum who was burnt alive in 1682 for his opposition to the reform of the Russian liturgy…

Christian doctrine gives a new value to human nature, to human history and to human life which is not to be found in the other great oriental religions.

It is true that there is another element in Orthodox Christianity which is neither Western nor humanist — I mean the tradition of the monks of the desert.

And thus while it is easy enough to conceive of an Oriental Christianity which has no affinity with any form of humanist culture, we must admit that it is very difficult in practice for such Christianity to hold its own against the various forms of unorthodox or non-Christian spirituality…

There is an interesting analysis of St. Paul’s “apparent anti-intellectualism”, Hellenism, and “the necessary conditions for the propagation of the new faith.”

For Monophysitism is only the first step in a far-reaching movement which carried the East away from Christianity and found its final expression in the uncompromising unitarian absolutism of Islam which rejects the whole idea of Incarnation and restores an impassable gulf between God and Man.

I don’t vouch for every one of Dawson’s conclusions, or some of his conceptual frameworks and terms (Catholic), but the paper is worth reading and thinking carefully about in the context of looking for an Orthodox approach to education and culture.

No Witnesses

Gilbert Highet, in The Art of Teaching (p. 117), writes:

In some schools pupils are “automatically promoted” every year. This means that even if they have been too lazy or stupid to master first-year geography they are pushed on to second-year geography to get them off the teacher’s hands, and to avoid the danger of giving them a feeling of inferiority to their intelligent and hard-working classmates. For this problem I see no solution except the radical one of declaring such numskulls to be unfit for education in book-work, and devising trade-schools, outdoor schools like the CCC camps, and domestic schools, to occupy their strong hands until they grow up. (Montaigne, who was a mild enough man and devoted to kindness as an educational ideal, has no solution either. He said that if a boy refused to learn or proved quite incapable of it, “his tutor should strangle him, if there are no witnesses, or else he should be apprenticed to a pastry-cook in some good town.”)

I’ve been having trouble with my 12yo…

Imitation

Classical education is all about developing art. Imitation is the key to developing art. Orthodoxy is all about imitation. Learning from the saints is learning spiritual art — via classical method.

Check out this meditation on the vocation of salvation by Fr. Joseph at the Conciliar Press blog. Fr. Joseph also writes the popular Orthodixie.

St. Gregory Palamas, Logic, and Beyond

I’m sorry I have not posted in so long. We have been “singing away” Fr. John, our beloved parish priest, who passed from death into Life this week. It has been an intense time.

The Conciliar Press Blog for today by John Stamps has the most enlightening piece on St. Gregory Palamas. Ever since discovering an article about St. Gregory and Aristotelian logic a couple years ago, I have been puzzling over how St. Gregory saw logic fitting in. This blog is an excellent help.