Paideia: The Soul of Classical Christian Education (Pt. 2)
Chapter One: Untitled Primer on Classical Christian Education
I’m currently revising the second draft of a short seven-chapter primer on Classical Christian Education and would like to invite you into the process by sharing this “work in progress” publicly. Please feel free to share your feedback; and, please help me title the book.
Introduction
Chapter One (Pt. 1)
I had intended to drop each chapter, serially, but the second draft of Chapter One comes in at roughly 3,500 words—a bit longer than most folks will read on Substack. So, I’m dropping Chapter One in three post over the next three days. Below is the second installment.
CHAPTER ONE (Pt. 2)
Paideia: The Soul of Classical Christian Education
1.3 The Wardrobe of the Moral Imagination
A crucial part of paideia is the cultivation of the moral imagination. Drawing from the 18th-century statesman and philosopher, Edmund Burke, Russel Kirk describes the moral imagination as the “power of ethical perception which strides beyond the barriers of private experience and momentary events drawn from centuries of human consciousness and expressed afresh from age to age.”1
What Kirk means is that for human beings to possess a profound moral vision, they must transcend their subjective reflections, which tend toward selfishness and error, as well as their provincial experiences, which tend toward narrow, unsophisticated thinking. If they are to apprehend what is good and, by God's grace, courageously bring it into reality for their own generation, they must draw from the centuries of wisdom handed down from previous generations.
One of the reasons the West is currently in decline again—it’s certainly not the first time; nor will it be the last2—has to do with modern education’s approach to cultivating the imagination. C. S. Lewis aptly noted that our imagination is the organ of meaning, the prerequisite faculty by which we perceive whether something is true or false. But given that mankind is inherently sinful, the imagination will either be formed or it will be deformed. It will never remain neutral. To borrow language from Irving Babbitt and T. S. Eliot, the imagination will either be idyllic, diabolic, or moral.3
Before children can reason well about what is good, they must first learn to love what is good. This is the purpose of humane letters and classical literature. Stories, myths, fairy tales, and historical narratives provide students with living images of virtue and vice. These stories shape their affections by helping them “taste and see” the beauty of goodness and the ugliness of evil. Here, Desiderius Erasmus’s famous adage is apropos: lectio transit in mores (reading shapes moral character). Given the reading content available in our modern age, I would add, “reading the right books shapes moral character.” Thus, “the end of great books is ethical—to teach us what it means to be genuinely human,” says Kirk.
In sum, the moral imagination is the soil in which wisdom grows.4
1.4 Piety as the Beginning of Wisdom
Modern education takes its inspiration from the democratic spirit and is, therefore, obsessed with youth and novelty—what is new and shiny—as opposed to what is venerable, what is tried, tested, and timeless. Classical Christian Education, on the other hand, recognizes that a proper education is an inheritance to be received—the collected wisdom of the ages handed down to us. The former view is established in hubris, where as the latter, in humility. This is essential to our understanding of paideia because one of its goals is piety. It is not a common or popular word in modernity because not only does it elude simple definition, pursuing piety requires real and certain humility.
In the classical tradition, piety has a general meaning of giving honor and reverence to those who are worthy of our devotion—our parents, our teachers, our elders, our magistrates, and above all, God. Richard Weaver summarizes this concisely when he claims, “Piety is a discipline of the will through respect.”5 In the Christian tradition, the idea of piety stretches back to the Mosaic Covenant. In Exodus 20:12, the Israelites were commanded to “Honor your father and your mother, that your days may be long in the land that the LORD your God is giving you.”
It is noteworthy, that this is the same passage St. Paul references in instructing the children to obey their parents just before he charges fathers to bring those same children up in the paideia of the Lord. Further, St. Augustine asserted that true virtue cannot exist except in those who have true piety.6 And, John Calvin called “piety that reverence joined with love of God which the knowledge of his benefits induces.”7 Finally, J. Gresham Machen asserted that “True learning and true piety go hand in hand, and Christianity embraces the whole of life—those are great central convictions that underlie the Christian school.”8
As it pertains to Classical Christian Education, piety is a posture of gratitude and reverence for the inheritance of curated wisdom and accumulated knowledge being handed down from previous generations—along with a humble willingness to be shaped by it and a sense of duty to live it out. Pious students recognize that the fear of the Lord is the beginning of both knowledge and wisdom.9
1.5 Community as the Context for Formation
Paideia is not a solitary endeavor. It is both formed and lived out within community. Families, schools, and churches often work together to nurture children in the love of God and neighbor. The metaphor of a three-legged stool is sometimes used to describe the necessity of harmony between these communities. Each leg—family, church, and school—must be intact, strong, and in proper proportion, to harmoniously support the healthy nurturing of children. If one leg is weak and wobbly, it creates imbalance and instability in the child's development. If one of the legs breaks down or is missing, the stool inevitably topples.
In many cases, students are educated at home. But this hardly disrupts the metaphor because the educational life of the child must still be consistent with his church’s teaching and his family’s social and moral life (e.g., the stool breaks down if the truths of the subjects being taught and the examples lived at home are inconsistent). More often than not, virtue is caught more than it’s taught.
Another reason community is an essential context for paideia is because students don’t learn in a vacuum. Conversation, dialectic, and Socratic dialogue are formative practices that build intellectual humility, temperance, charity, prudence, and courage. These conversations and their cultivated virtues are indispensable for discerning right and wrong, curating wisdom, and pursuing truth, goodness, and beauty.
Conversation can be understood as informal, but purposeful, discussion aimed at mutual understanding and discovery. Dialectic is related to logic in that it is systematic reasoning in pursuit of clarity and insight. Where logic engages static properties and deductive reasoning, dialectic involves questions and answers, propositions and counter-propositions, all aimed explicitly at discovering truth. Finally, Socratic dialogue challenges assumptions by peeling back layers of faulty thinking in an effort to uncover more of what is not true, which is another way of getting closer to the truth.10 As the late Fr. James Schall noted, “education is not only being able to see and explain what is real, “but also [to be able to] explain the false views [and] to know “what it is to be unintelligent and vicious.”11
Finally, a student’s community is more than just his living interlocutors. Because paideia is, in part, the reception of an inherited tradition, students must give heed to “the most obscure of all communities, our ancestors,” what G. K. Chesterton called “the democracy of the dead.” What he means is that we must commune with the wise thinkers of the past through their books and letters.
Robert Hutchins articulated the point well when he asserted, “The tradition of the West is embodied in the Great Conversation that began in the dawn of history and that continues to the present day.”12 This is one of the reasons C. S. Lewis admonished his readers to read old books, so they could join the conversation in its proper context and “see the real bearing of what is said.”13 In community, students learn to live harmoniously with others, respect authority, collaborate in learning, and ultimately participate in the shared work of cultural renewal. Classical Christian Education thrives in healthy relationships—between students and teachers, parents and mentors, and the past and present.
The final installment of Chapter One (Pt. 3) will treat:
1.6 The Harmony of Knowledge and Virtue
1.7 Teachers as Shepherds of Souls
Conclusion: Paideia: A Legacy for Life
https://kirkcenter.org/kirk-essays/kirk-essay-the-moral-imagination/ This footnote will further expand with cited sources to unpack Edmund Burk’s use of the moral imagination and Russell Kirk’s exposition of the idea.
J. R. R. Tolkien expresses this idea of reoccurring evil through Gandalf’s conversations with Frodo:
I wish it need not have happened in my time,' said Frodo.
'So do I, said Gandalf, 'and so do all who live to see such times.
But that is not for them to decide. All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us. And already, Frodo, our time is beginning to look black. The Enemy is fast becoming very strong.
His plans are far from ripe, I think, but they are ripening. We shall be hard put to it. We should be very hard put to it, even if it were not for this dreadful chance…
Other evils there are that may come; for Sauron is himself but a servant or emissary. Yet it is not our part to master all the tides of the world, but to do what is in us for the succour of those years wherein we are set, uprooting the evil in the fields that we know, so that those who live after may have clean earth to till. What weather they shall have is not ours to rule.
The idyllic imagination is represented in the philosophy of the father of Romanticism, Jean-Jacque Rousseau, who rejected the Christian West’s inherited norms and rejoiced in man’s “emancipation from duty and convention.” We would be very close to the mark to suggest Rousseau’s “idyllic imagination” was an 18th century spark that ignited the 60s sexual revolution. As Irving Babbitt noted, Rousseau’s philosophy was “a parody of Christian charity” (Babbitt, Democracy and Leadership, 98). He “invented nothing, but set everything on fire” (Babbitt, Democracy and Leadership, 119).
The diabolic imagination, according to Eliot, is revealed in that literature in which one finds “the most fruitful operations of the Evil Spirit.”3 The diabolic imagination is not the same as that which conjures such horror as Aeschylus’s Oedipus Rex, but that which Kirk describes as delighting “in the perverse and subhuman,” that which panders “to the lust for violence, destruction, cruelty, and sensational disorder.” In other words, the diabolic imagination is what dominates much of modern fiction, a great deal of the television networks, and most streaming services (Eliot, after strange gods, 53).
Many parents new to Classical Christian education have questioned the wisdom of allowing Christian children to read Pagan literature, myths, and fairy tales. This note will expand on Chesterton’s treatment of the subject in Tremendous Trifles (children already know bogey’s exist; they need to know they can be defeated) and Lewis’s treatment of similar in Abolition of Man (i.e., irrigating deserts not cutting down jungles).
Weaver, Ideas Have Consequences, 155
St. Augustine, City of God, XV:22.
John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion & 2, ed. John T. McNeill, trans. Ford Lewis Battles, vol. 1, The Library of Christian Classics (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2011), 41.
John Gresham Machen, Education, Christianity, and the State (Hobbs, New Mexico: The Trinity Foundation), 81.
Proverbs 1:7; 9:10
This footnote will further expand with cited sources to unpack elenchus and maieutics.
James V. Schall, The Life of the Mind: On the Joys and Travails of Thinking (Wilmington, DE: ISI Books, 2008), 40.
Hutchins, The Great Conversation, 1.
C. S. Lewis, On Reading Old Books, 219.
I love it.