Ep 03 | Can You Even Teach Virtue?: A Primer
Everything has a catchphrase, including the classical world. Well, maybe we have two.
I bet you think I’m talking about some truth, goodness, and beauty, but no, not yet. I’m talking about the other one.
Footnotes for this episode
Consider This, Karen Glass
Abolition of Man, C.S. Lewis
The Great Tradition, ed. Richard Gamble
Of Education, John Milton
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Everything has a catchphrase. That golden line that’s tossed about to show how in you are. Usually, the catchphrase is important to the idea, hence being the catchphrase and all, but still, it gets dropped without really understanding what it means.
I think there are two in the classical world. One, you’ve probably guessed, is truth, goodness, and beauty. We’re going to get to that one later this season.
The other is the cultivation of virtue and wisdom.
It sounds great. Yes, please, let me cultivate some virtue and wisdom in this gaggle of children in my home. But do you know how that’s done? How to define and understand virtue? Or, if you’re like 2018 me, do you know how to respond when someone says, “Virtue? Like being good? Autumn, you can’t make your children good. Only God can do that.” Is virtue a church thing or can it be an education thing? Is there a theological issue here? What exactly does the catchphrase mean?
What say you? Can you even teach virtue?
_________
Every classical mother-teacher has a wardrobe moment—one day, all of a sudden, an idea seized her mind, like some sort of an awakening, and she hasn’t been the same since. The world is brighter, the path clearer, and, honestly, she’s not interested in going back. But after the wardrobe moment, there are a few paths one walks through the classical world, and there’s this funny loop in the Victorian hills that many of us take while entering the Mason land.
You see, Mason has this seemingly pesky second principle that often makes a Christian mom take a hard U-turn back toward safer ground. If you were with me last season for our journey through Mason’s twenty principles, grab a quick cup of coffee while I recap her second principle for those who were not.
She says, “Children are not born either good or bad, but with possibilities for good and for evil.”
Do you see the trouble there? I really think she could’ve been more thoughtful with her word choice to save us all some trouble. It sounds like she’s making a statement about the salvific nature of things, if a child is born with a good nature or a bad nature or, in this case, a neutral-y nature. But she’s actually speaking about a child’s character. Children are persons and they are born with the potential for a good character or a bad character—meaning it’s not set in stone, which was the prevailing idea in Victorian England. Character was sort of like genetics; you get what you get and not much can be done to change the course of things. Mason knew this wasn’t true, so she’s acknowledging that a child can grow in and out, up and down, to and fro in their character—cultivating a good or evil character based on what they repeatedly think, love, and do. And how was a child to be taught to be one of good character? Through education, of course. (Which, if you’re very new to Mason, means an atmosphere of right relating, the discipline of habits, and life or relationship with living ideas.)
Once again this sounds lovely until someone asks if you can actually educate someone to goodness. It’s this episode’s introduction all over again.
It seems, to me, that we ask the question, “Can you even teach virtue?” because modern education doesn’t aim for goodness or character or virtue. We focus on college and skills and jobs and other utilitarian aims. It’s out of place to us in a conversation about education to mention virtue or wisdom—those are soul things, church things, not school things.
But that’s where we’re wrong.
As I’ve said before, classical education is an old way of understanding and moving in the world. Learning classical pedagogy demands a new way of seeing the world, determining just courses of action, and re-orienting the aim of education. It may be hard for us to believe it now, but until about 200 years ago, education was never separated from the idea of forming virtuous people.
In a few more episodes, we’re going to learn about the seven liberal arts of classical education. They’re referred to as liberal because they are liberating or freeing for the person. This is distinct from the servile arts which are education for employment and, yes, that is the bulk of what we now call education. But, anyway, liberal arts are an end in themselves. I don’t want anyone to be confused when we reach that episode because it sounded like I said the end of education was virtue but, what do you know, the end of the liberal arts is the liberal arts. It’s a fine line but to keep your compass pointed north here, think of it like this:
We study the liberal arts because it gives us the whole of reality for the sake of itself. It’s not to get a job, to earn money, to gain fame. It’s also not to get virtue. It does, however, make virtue possible.
I have a tiny ballerina in my home. I will venture to guess that many of you do too. So, let’s consider the tiny ballerinas. They, when rightly ordered, do not sign up for elementary ballet so they can one day make money or be healthy or travel the world. (Admittedly, they may be doing it for a tutu.) No, they practice at the barre; moving their bodies for first position, plies, pirouettes; stretching and jumping, and the whole thing. And they do all of this because that is how one does ballet. It’s an end in itself. And yet, doing ballet properly will make it possible for these little ladies to achieve physical virtue: strength, flexibility, endurance, form. Virtue was not the point of ballet, but it was made possible through ballet.
Education and virtue are kind of like that.
Which is why “cultivating virtue and wisdom” is the magical phrase of the classical world. It’s not that it sounds great, it’s that education is the way by which you can cultivate virtue by submitting to education’s form and design. As we learned last time with Aristotle’s four causes, the end of education is a person who knows, loves, and enjoys God—that is, to be a person in right relationship with God, man, and the universe; or to understand God’s reality as it truly is. By pursuing this, it’s likely that you’ll feed the whole person what they need to truly live, and in doing that, you will teach virtue.
But we should probably have a good idea of what that means, right? What is virtue?
I’ve given you the brief, easy definition before: excellence. But—to really get into it— virtue comes from the Latin virtus, which comes from the root vir which means “man”. Virtue, then, is about man attaining excellence.
You should know: whenever I drop some Latin, I’m keenly aware I’m probably mispronouncing it. But, hey, when you read all your classical stuff, that happens. No shame in the self-education game.
Now, there are four kinds of virtue: moral, intellectual, physical, and spiritual. I’ll briefly explain them but I want you to listen to the natural ability that all persons are born with and then consider what excellence of that thing would look like.
Moral virtue is the one most people think about when they hear the word virtue. It’s being able to do what is right and not do what is wrong. So, we know that everyone is born with the ability to figure out what is right and what is wrong, but we also know that not everyone develops that so it’s excellently applied and lived out. Not all have courage. Not all are faithful. Not all are pure of heart. But some are.
Intellectual virtue is about understanding. It’s being able to use things like reason, language, or comparison to rightly apply right knowledge. You might think of excellence in this as wisdom, which is also why I’m only breaking down the idea of teaching virtue.
Physical virtue is all about the body, so strength, coordination, speed, stamina, and the like.
Lastly, spiritual virtue is oriented towards God and is usually categorized differently than the other virtues. The theological virtues are faith, hope, and charity, or love.
This is what classical education has been obsessed with since the beginning. What is virtue in these four ways and how do we get it?
The how do we get it part is most easily understood in two ways.
First, you have to practice the thing. Just like you have to practice a physical faculty, like a ballet move, repeatedly for years for it to become a natural, delightful, beautiful thing, you have to practice the other faculties too for them to become habit and then for them to become virtue.
Second, each faculty must be fed according to what it needs. For the moral and intellectual virtues, you must feed the soul with truth, goodness, and beauty. For the physical virtues, you must feed the body healthy food, rest, and movement. For the spiritual virtues, you must feed the spirit with the life of the Church.
I remember piecing this together and seeing the distinction between the soul and the spirit and thinking this is the answer to so many Christian objections about teaching virtue outside of salvation in Christ. Classically, the soul has more to do with moral and intellectual virtue which is why we can speak about cultivating the soul for any person. It’s not that these methods are not under the natural philosophy of education as created by God for his world—they certainly are—but it’s not the same as the spiritual virtues which are directed to God, given by God alone, and revealed by divine revelation in the Holy Scriptures. Just like water flows, there are natural laws to how a person learns, how one lives to find a “good life”, and what satisfies the image bearer. Submitting to these natural laws can lead a man into a life of virtue and goodness or not. What we repeatedly think, love, and do shapes us and our character in the direction of goodness or evil.
So, can you even teach virtue? I think you can, but we have to dig in a bit deeper.
You see, this little episode was just a primer to get the conversation about virtue going. In the next three episodes, I’m going to introduce you to some of my favorite people who’ve spilled a lot of ink on the question of how one teaches virtue. It’s not just an ethics course or a list of rules or a few good teachers. It’s so much more.
Stretching from Plato to Plutarch to G.K. Chesterton, we’re going to meet educational philosophers who’ve studied virtue from various angles and determined it can be—must be—taught through classical education. We’ll look at how one orders a soul, imitates the Good, forms the imagination, embodies story, and breathes the sacramental air of our world. There are so things to say about virtue, I had to make a bit of a mini-series within this season.
But, can I tell you right now what brings me so much delight? These nine philosophers span 2,423 years. They were pagans, Eastern Orthodox, Roman Catholics, and Anglicans. They were teachers, statesmen, historians, writers, priests, monastics, gardeners. They hailed from around the world.
And yet, every single one of them found, in the ideas we’ll hear in the coming weeks, something universal, something that transcended their time, place, vocation, and theological traditions. Something they’d like to pass on to us.
I’ll see you guys in two weeks.
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