Ep 01 | Only the Ancients Are Classical All of the Time
Who knew there was so much Charlotte Mason in the ideas of Plato? If we’re getting our bearings in the classical world, then we need to go all the way back to Plato and get a handle on the Greek vision of education. Actually, we need to go back even further.
I told you this was another world.
Footnotes for this episode
The Republic, Plato
The Great Tradition, ed. Gamble
Norms and Nobility, Hicks
Abolition of Man, Lewis
Middlemarch, Eliot
The Liberal Arts Tradition, Clarke & Jain
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READ THE TRANSCRIPT
In the beginning, there was Plato. Just kidding. In the beginning, there was Homer.
__________
It seems only fitting to start at what, arguably, is the beginning. You see, classical education is an ancient way of learning. It’s really old. And it isn’t the easiest thing to nail down.
There are some who will point to this philosopher or that statesman, this schoolmaster or that theologian, this historian or that mom on the internet and claim a single stream of classical education as the stream.
So, I want to be very clear—here at the start of our journey into the past—that classical education is one long conversation in the direction of virtue and wisdom. It has spanned 24 centuries and many a man, and woman, have pulled up a chair to ask questions and offer insights into what it means to be whole, or, what it means to be a person.
If I wanted to wrap up season three right here and now, I’d say that’s the thing that fundamentally changes between our modern education and this ancient classical education. No longer is the primary concern the modern question of what can man do but instead, we reorient to the question of old: what ought man do? What does it mean to be a man? To be just, temperate, humble? To be virtuous and wise?
And therein lies a distinction worth a lifetime of study.
But, I’m not ready to wrap up season three. We’re just getting started.
Classical education has never been only one way of practice, but it does hold true to eternal principles throughout its history. You will, of course, find tensions, poor taste, and inconsistencies in 2,400 years worth of conversation. But you’ll also find a spirit of inquiry unmatched in the modern age and a prudent search for truth, goodness, and beauty in changing generations and places.
It’s not Western or white or male. It’s human and it deals with what we have in common.
In that sense, classical education is not only for one place or time, which means it’s also for us today. What I love about classical education is that it’s something aiming for our real future, not the utopian one we imagine with our very best intentions. It has answers about how to learn to love well, how to cultivate a mind, how to heal a soul, how men usually act, and how to help them move towards goodness.
Rather than grabbing books right off the press or jumping into new educational theories about how to create a perfect future, it looks back and studies, noting what has formed man towards God and holds to that.
It’s important you realize that how things are today is not how they’ve always been. That’s actually why today’s episode is titled “Only the Ancients Are Classical All of the Time”. It comes straight from George Eliot’s Middlemarch wherein Rosamund—not my favorite character—comments on the music of their time, saying “Mortals must share the fashions of their times, and none but the ancients can be always classical”.
When I read that, it made me laugh. Because aren’t we mortals often at the mercy of our time’s fashions, philosophies, and nonsense? C.S. Lewis called it blindspots and noted that we all have them, but by reading old books we mortals can see our own more clearly. And in that sense, it’s the ancients that have revealed my modern, very un-classical blind spots to me, and to them, I tip my hat, for being classical all of the time.
Anyway, education pretty much ran this course of educating for virtue until about 200 to 250 years ago. There was a loss of transcendence in exchange for materialism. There was a loss of humility and cultivation in exchange for pride and utility. There was a loss of ought in exchange for can.
If you’re like me, you’re tired of a world—or a school— obsessed with convenience, technology, efficiency, and utility. You see the past as valuable and not as a time lesser than our own moment. I think you’ll find peace of mind and courage of heart in this season of The Commonplace. Every mother-teacher feels the natural desire to teach their children what is good, but now it’s time to learn how to teach them to serve what is good above self, to reproduce it, and to bear the responsibility of that knowledge.
Okay, we’re going to do the thing that scares many a new classical mom away: we’re going to talk about Plato. Or, I guess, actually, we need to go farther back to Homer.
There isn’t a conversation about classical education without first acknowledging the great poet who brought the living ideas of Greek virtue to the people. He shaped Greek life and education with clear pictures of heroism, citizenship, honor, and glory in his epic poetry. Really, it was very Mason of him to use a narrative form to share ideas with the Greek minds.
And now that Miss Mason’s made her way into season three, I might as well say, she’s going to be around a lot. You know, Charlotte Mason is very classical.
But after acknowledging that Homer did, in fact, teach Greece, it’s only right to turn to Plato who is often considered the beginning of the Great Conversation we call classical education. Many people don’t know that a lot of his work centers around education. It can sound like we’re talking about a perfect city or a legal case or the ideal ruler (which, side note: ancient philosophers always argued for the philosopher-king. I wonder why.).
But Plato’s not really talking about a city; he’s talking about a soul, an inner city, that must match the order of a heavenly city. And how does one order the inner city? The soul?
You know this one.
Let me say it another way: how does a mother-teacher help the city of Mansoul, as Mason called it?
Through the atmosphere, discipline, and life.
Yes, Plato believed that education enables a man to reach the aim of his life, and the true aim was discovered in pursuing the transcendentals—truth, goodness, beauty—through atmosphere, practices, and ideas. I know; this was the path towards what Plato called the proper care and perfection of the soul even in 400 BC.
Now, as Christians classically educating, it can be tempting to jump ahead and note that this fine philosopher did not know Christ and therefore did not have the Ideal Type we know Christ is. And that’s true. He didn’t know of the God-man to come, and I can’t say if he would have recognized him when he did, but through a general sort of revelation, Plato—and many others—were getting very close to the full truth here.
It reminds me of something else C.S. Lewis said that can really scandalize you if you’re not ready, so, prepare thyself. He said that before we worry about converting moderns to Christianity, we need first to make them really good pagans and then make them Christians.
Why would he say this? Well, pagans had a good handle on the natural laws of the world while moderns dismiss any type of law, especially a divine law. Like Mason who said we forgo our natural inheritance, we moderns fail to hold the full picture of the law in our lives—whether divine or natural.
And Plato, well, Plato had a good thing going with his pagan educational beliefs. Like, that thing about the cave.
I’m old enough to be under the illusion that Plato’s Allegory of the Cave is still introductory humanities reading at universities. But as a quick refresher, we’re given a mental image of men chained in a cave, facing a wall. This is all they’ve ever known, what they were born into. Behind them is a large fire and in between them and the fire is a low wall. Along the wall, people carry objects back and forth, things like images of people and animals. Sometimes they speak and sometimes they don’t. The captives are unable to move their heads and so all they see are the shadows moving in front of them through the reflections on the cave wall. This is their reality, their truth; they believe these shadows are real and are the causes of the sounds. But, one day, one is set free and stands up. If he was to turn towards the fire, what would happen? It would hurt him. He’d close his eyes, turn away, and gasp in pain. But, mainly, it would make it impossible for him to see the objects moving on the partition. The light would overwhelm his sight. If someone tried to explain to him that the shadows he knew his entire life were an illusion and these new objects were real, how do you think he would respond? He’d probably fight it, saying that his shadows were more real than what he was seeing. But, what if someone dragged him out of the cave and put him out into the sun? Wouldn’t that be even worse for the man? Wouldn’t he be near blinded and unable to see clearly anything before him? Well yes, for a time. If a surprise light has ever blinded you, you know how this goes: first, your eyes start to adjust and you can make out the outlines of things around you. You might see reflections if you look down and at a puddle. A few more minutes and you’d see those things clearly straight-on. Your sight would become natural again.
But Plato continues, saying the man would then be able to behold the heavenly bodies—heaven itself—by the light of the stars and moon. Lastly, the man would be able to gaze upon the sun as it really is. And then, the man will begin to reason. He’ll understand the sun has been the source and governor of everything, the origin of all things known.
This is, of course, would be a delight and a wonder and it would be only natural for him to remember those chained in the cave who believe wrongly. What would happen if he went back?
Well, he’d be a different man with different cares and concerns. A cave filled with men focused on winning prizes for recognizing their shadows has little hold or importance to a man who has been liberated to truth. But when he returned to the cave, he would re-enter the darkness, and isn’t that just as difficult on the eyes? He wouldn’t be able to recognize the shadows or see what the captives saw and before long, he would become a joke. They’d laugh and decide his journey up was a waste of time. They’d mock him, and, possibly, kill him for attempting to take them up to such a place. And yet, he is the only one who can contemplate real things.
What Plato is getting at here is the journey of the soul into the intelligible world or the world of understanding. As the sight clears, the soul sees rightly. The way a man became wide awake to truth and goodness was by having knowledge through immense effort.
Now, we know from last season, knowledge comes from encountering living ideas in their proper forms and incarnating them through narration. Or, we take them in through our telling back, making them ours as if they were experienced or embodied by us.
This is not a uniquely Mason idea. No, no.
Plato believed that knowledge was a continued habit or act of learning, and it wasn’t just to know facts but to teach the mind and body to will and act in accordance with that knowledge.
Do you hear it all coming together?
Knowledge is being wide awake to goodness, which requires the student to practice habits of mind and body in order to will himself towards what’s good.
Let me add a quick footnote to that: Charlotte Mason principles #1, 2, 5, 6, 7, 8, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, and 19.
This education—this ordering of man’s soul—involved the whole person. Just like an eye can’t turn towards the light without the body moving, the soul can only turn towards the good as the knowledge of the brightest and best deepen in the mind.
And here is some really good news from Plato: all souls have the capacity to learn this because all children are…born persons.
We know a bit about that one.
Okay, so this was a lot of Plato and maybe you didn’t anticipate getting so ancient over your cup of coffee with me today. I understand. Let’s lighten it up a bit by turning to Aristotle.
No, really, I think you’ll like how he describes this life towards goodness, or what we usually call the life of virtue.
So our modern man, like all men, believes in the pursuit of happiness. This is normal for all people in all places. How we define happiness is, of course, dependent on many things. I think it’s fair to say we believe the life of happiness to be one of pleasure. It’s why we talk to children about “doing well in school”. How’s it go? So you can get good grades, so you can go to a good college, so you can get a good job, so you can…what? Have the means to pursue your pleasures. The concern not being on the quality of those pleasures themselves—as Mason wrote and the end of the 19th century.
But Aristotle paints, for me, a far brighter and more satisfying vision of happiness built around the Greek idea of arete, or excellence.
Assuming a man has the bare necessities—food, water, shelter—happiness can only be found in a life that knows and reveres, wonders, and acts upon the good, that loves and reproduces the beautiful, and that pursues excellence and moderation in all things.
He called it the theoretic life and believed it completed the man who had within him the divine spark.
Yeah, I know; a pagan writing about the divine spark. I love it. While Christ is the fullness and perfection of all the beautiful ideas the Greeks circled around, I can’t help but be delighted by this awareness of transcendence in our world—to see that the Great Conversation began with an acknowledgment of the divine and the belief that education was for the soul.
Like I said at the top, until very recently, education was about the soul even by those with partial knowledge of its true potential in Christ. You see, every person has the same claim on his life. It’s not to be great at politics or medicine or business; it’s not to be popular or rich, not to be a leader or a world changer. Every man must aim to be good. It’s the whole “the character is the measure of the man” thing. And from Plato to Jane Austen, this was, generally speaking, the commonplace definition of education.
Until it wasn’t.
On the eve of the Industrial Revolution and the wake of the Enlightenment, there was a shift from the care and perfection of the soul to preparation for jobs. It’s a wonder, really, that anyone managed to work before this time…with all that soul stuff.
Preparing for a new world with factories led to creating schools that were a lot like factories and not much has changed since. Children sit quietly in rows, moving when signaled by a clock, learning what can be useful for work, for profit.
But there is good news here. While education can take a wrong turn, it is also capable of reforming. It’s what C.S. Lewis called the about-turn, what Mason called the awakening, and what Plato called the periagoge, or the turn-around.
It’s what I call the Great Conversation.
Maybe you’ll remember a bit of this from last season, but conversation originally meant a way of life and its root versare is related to vertere, both meaning…to turn, to transform.
Which means for 2,400 years classical education has maintained one long conversation about turning to truth, goodness, and beauty so we can become persons of virtue and wisdom.
But you know, what was it that other old guy from 1000 BC said? Oh right. The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom, and the knowledge of the Holy One is understanding.
There it was all along: the heartbeat of education.
I’ll see you in two weeks.
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