A classical temptation

Classical educators value knowledge. It would be hard to imagine a school that could be considered classical that doesn't use a core set of texts that students are expected to know, not just to say they have read. Classical schools expect students to learn the math tables and become proficient in math processes. They expect students to know lots of facts about the cosmos in science class. They often require vast lists of data and texts to be memorized. Because classical educators value knowledge.

Every virtue carries within itself its potential vice. There is a temptation that is common to classical man, and it has overtaken many a classical teacher, student, or governing body. That is the temptation to reduce the student to a beast or a machine that is able to reproduce knowledge when given the popular stimulants. To speak in terms of the four causes, it is hard to resist the temptation to view the child as a stimulus-response mechanism - a material and efficient cause alone.

Because we value knowledge we can give in to the idea that reproduction of measurable data points is the measure of the knowledge we teach.

Let me see if I can clarify with an example, even though to give an example will get me in trouble precisely because we classicists are inclined to make this particular mistake. Young children, we are consistently reminded, have a great capacity to remember capacious realms of information. So we use chants and jingles and rythyms and rhymes to help them remember things. This is fine so far as it goes.

The trouble arises when we think the students have learned something that means something t them when they can repeat the words. It is as if they are computers and the facts are bits of data. You repeat the data until the computer is programmed with it. You push the button or click the link and the computer prints out the information. They even tend, as parents and teachers and marketers say, to "love it."

Repetition, rhythms, rhymes, and movements powerfully aid the memory. They are good things because of it. But they don't, in and of themselves, enable a child to understand things. They give the information, but they don't interpret it. The child isn't actually THINKING when he is chanting. In fact, he might be doing something quite opposed to thinking.

That is why so many children who learn Latin jingles or grammar jingles or math jingles can't do Latin, grammar, or math. That it works for some does nothing to alter this fact.

A different activity of the mind is required to understand. But some classical schools go so far as to argue that in the grammar stage children can't understand grammar or math or history. Of course that is true if you mean that they can't understand it at the abstract level of a logic or rhetoric stage student. But I have taught students of every age and helped home school my own five. I have sat around the dinner table with four year old children. I have seen them understand basic ideas.

The two ways we classical educators give in to this temptation are:

• Using programmed instruction (these programmed programs are TOTALLY rooted in behaviorism)
• Teaching the grammar stage as though the students can only repeat information and cannot understand what they are learning.

Classical and Christian thought teach that we act with purpose following patterns in a manner consistent with the dust of which we are made and the spirit that was breathed into us using intellectual and physical tools to fulfill our purposes. When we only acknowledge the dust of which we are made and the tools we use, we are not implementing the full glory of Christian classical educational theory.

Classical Christian education is the relentless embodiment of the idea - the incarnate Logos being the pattern for all thinking and expression.

Synthesis or Fulfillment: the problem of two knowledges

William Manchester was a brilliant writer and historian, but in his work "A World Lit Only By Fire" he makes a mistake that characterizes almost everybody's thought about the middle ages since Ockham tried to oversimplify the world with his razor. He argued that medieval Christian philosophers tried to synthesize Christian and Classical Greek and Roman thought.

I suppose there must have been some who tried to do that. Those who did were committing a grievous error, though one that is easy to sympathise with. When the Greek writings came to Europe through the Muslims, they had been affected profoundly by the Muslim philosophers, Averroes among their leaders.

You don't have to read a lot of Muslim writings to come to the conclusion that there is a radical barrier between the glory of their God and the things we can know and do. He isn't just transcendent, he is utterly removed. He is so sovereign as to not have a nature. As a result, Muslim philosophers were never able to reconcile the discoveries of Greek philosophers and scientists with Muslim teaching. Averroes response was to create the theory of two truths. He wanted to be a philosopher and he wanted to survive in the Muslim world. But philosophy and Islam are not compatible - nor is science and Islam, political theorizing and Islam, or a fully developed aesthetic and Islam.

Like every fundamentalism, including Christian fundamentalism when it is really fundamentalism, Islam is in conflict with nature.

When the Greek philosophers reached medieval Europe after the Carolingian Renaissance and through the crusades, they had been interpreted by the Muslims with that dualistic mindset. Muslim philosophers tended to be Muslim heretics - as Averroes was judged to be. Many Christian leaders felt the same thing would happen to Christian thinkers if they read the Greek philosophers too closely, and in some cases it did happen. Siger of Brabant and William of Occam are the prime examples.

Both accepted the idea that there are two knowledges, though Siger was more explicit about it. He argued that there is a knowledge that is gained through rational thought and another that is gained through faith. That these are two ways of knowing is one thing. To say that they know two different truths is delusional. Yet this is the very idea that Christian fundamentalists in the Middle Ages used to, as they thought, defend the faith against Greek philosophy.

But this is horrible. This is a philosophical rejection of Christ. If Manchester is right and the medievel Christians were following the medieval Muslim philosophers by trying to synthesize philosophy with Christian thought, then some ideas and facts sit outside the Christian scope of truth. But if Christ is the Logos that John said He is, if it is in Him that all things will be summed up, if all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge are in Him, then there is no possibility of synthesis. If something is true, it fits within the scope of Christian truth.

For if the Bible teaches anything, it teaches that there is one truth - not a truth of faith and a truth of reason, not a truth of the mind and a truth of the heart, not your truth and my truth - one truth. One Truth.

The Christian philosopher doesn't seek to synthesize Christian and extra-Christian truth. He seeks to know the truth. And he knows that the truth must be ordered to and by the Logos or horrible, horrible errors will develop.

Neither synthesis nor antithesis is the solution. The fulmillment, the summing up, of all things in Christ is the only viable end for history and for thought.

The Logos, in short, overthrows every dualism. All that is discovered by anyone is tested by and ordered to and by the touchstone of the Logos. That is the essence of Christian thought.

Conference speakers - 2005

Laura Behrquist has agreed to speak this summer. Laura is a classical educator in California who has provided excellent materials for home schoolers, including Designing Your Own Classical Curriculum and The Harp and the Laurel Wreath. I'm very excited because this means I get to meet her and because I know she will have a great deal to contribute to the discussions at the conference.

Laura Behrquist, James Taylor, Ken Myers, Michael Eatmon, James Daniels, me, and Martin Cothran. I can't believe the people God brings us. Have you made plans yet to be there? July 28-30, 2005. Book it.

Blogging and forum schedule

I try to write as much as my schedule permits because I think on paper and because people have told me they find it valuable. Because I have a few different places in which I write, I'm setting up a schedule for when I do each. I'll visit the web site forums every Wednesday when I can. I'll do the web site on Tuesdays and Fridays. And I'll blog on Mondays and Thursdays and any other day when time or compulsion permit.

We've got a new shipment of Norms and Nobility and Classical Education. If you haven't read these books, visit the web site and get them!! www.classicalteachertraining.org.

Evolution Wired

Wired magazine ran an article in its October 2004 issue arguing that Intelligent Design is a very clever religious movement masquerading as science. It pretends, the article suggested, to use methodological materialism to show that evolution couldn't have happened because of the irreducible complexity of the simplest organism. In fact, says the writer, it is a religious position and 10,000 scientists know evolution is true for every one who believes otherwise.

Two brief thoughts and perhaps more later:
1. This article, like every single pro-evolution article I can remember in 30 years of reading about the issue, makes no case for evolution; it simply assumes it to have happened. If anybody knows of a good article or book that argues the case for evolution without arguing from the conclusion and mocking my sincere questions, would you please let me know about it. I don't mind the mocking, because that is what we do when we are insecure. But I want to see the arguments.

2. This article reminded me of the conflict between Siger of Brabant and Thomas Aquinas. Thomas defended the right of Christians to think deeply, to value the created order and to seek to know it, to use reason according to its purpose. He believed there is one truth, which can be known many ways (e.g. poetically, rhetorically, dialectically, and scientifically). Siger of Brabant came along and pretended to agree with Thomas.

Siger also said that we can know truth many different ways - and so far they did agree. But the reason we can know the truth different ways, Siger went on, is because there are different truths. There is the spiritual truth of religion known by faith and there is, on the other hand, the rational truth of the world around us.

This dualism is necessary for pagan religions that have inadequate gods and it is also necessary for the Muslims from which Siger learned his philosophy. But it is an abomination to Christianity. Christ is the Logos. He is the Truth. To suggest that there are multiple worlds is to deny Genesis 1, Hebrews 1, John 1, and the golden thread that harmonizes the whole Bible.

This is precisely why I argue that only Christianity can sustain a true philosophy. Paganism, Hinduism, Islam, Buddhism, pantheism, and every heresy break into some sort of dualism. And dualism prevents the possibility of rational thought rooted in a Logos. We Christians need to defend our right to think a little more aggressively against those who would silence us - especially our insecure and fearful brothers and sisters.

Perfect love casts out fear, and fear is not faith, and whatever is not of faith is sin.

THINK. Let not your hearts be troubled. You believe in God. Believe also in Him who is Truth.