All shall be well, all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well.
In the reading about Arvo Pärt that I have done over the years, the most memorable and insightful bits are almost invariably those spoken or written by Pärt himself. I was very pleased, therefore, to find video of a short address which he gave, in English, when he received an honorary doctorate from St Vladimir’s Seminary in 2014. It does not disappoint.
Beauty in the Word
Stratford Caldecott
(Angelico, 2012)
168 p.
In an earlier book, Beauty for Truth’s Sake, Stratford Caldecott, in the guise of a treatment of the classical quadrivium, outlined his thoughts on how education might begin to reintegrate the dissociated sensibility of the West, in which truth, understood as objective and impersonal and more-or-less narrowed to the domain of the sciences, stands on one side, and goodness and beauty, understood as subjective and private, stand on the other, and never the thrain shall meet.
Beauty in the Word is a companion volume, where this time the subject is the classical trivium, but the objectives are comparably deep and far-reaching.
He begins with an overview of competing visions and theories of education, with a particular question in mind: “What kind of education would enable a child to progress in the rational understanding of the world without losing his poetic and artistic appreciation of it?” He argues that education is not principally about conveying information or developing skills, but about formation of character in mind and heart; it is about who we will be, not what we will do. He cites with approval Simone Weil’s famous proposal that the most important thing about education is not what we study, but how we study, and in particular that we promote “the development of attention”, a habit essential to the intellectual and spiritual health of the person. For Caldecott, education is always about the person. “Education is more like gardening than manufacturing.”
In his survey of educational theories, a basic dialectic between didactic and elucidative methods emerges. One side says that education is about instruction, for the child is ignorant and can only learn if told; the other side says that the child has interests and abilities and should be encouraged and accompanied as he or she grows and matures. The one pours in, the other draws out. My own instincts are didactic, but Caldecott (drawing on the ideas of Maria Montessori) mounts a defence of the latter view for a Catholic understanding of education, and in the end he arrives at a middle position:
“The basis for a good education is, on the one hand, the self-motivation of the child to pursue what engages and interests him, and on the other, the creativity, responsiveness, and love of the teacher, who sets the terms for learning and encourages the child to flourish.”
The role of the teacher is to help the child to grow in understanding and range, and to avoid the trap of a “relevant” education, in which a pupil is flattered or merely allowed to stagnate within their limited horizon. On the contrary, a Catholic education is one which is directed toward helping the student to mature, and also to help them appropriate the tradition of which they are an heir, in order that they can inhabit it and then, in due time, bequeath it to the next generation. “Ideally, Catholicism fulfils and brings to perfection the natural educational process, which is the transformation in creative freedom of a cultural tradition to our children.”
Turning then to the classical trivium of grammar, dialectic, and rhetoric, Caldecott cites the definitions of Hugh of St Victor: “Grammar is the knowledge of how to speak without error; dialectic is clear-sighted argument which separates the true from the false; rhetoric is the discipline of persuading to every suitable thing.” And this is so, as far as it goes, but he proceeds to deepen each of the three in a trilogy of chapters, and he does so by setting up a catalogue of triplets to be understood as analogies or implications or parallels of the basic educational trivium. His set of “Eight Threes” looks like this:
| Mythos | Logos | Ethos |
| Grammar | Dialectic | Rhetoric |
| Remembering | Thinking | Speaking |
| Music/Dance | Visual arts | Drama |
| One | True | Good |
| True | Good | Beautiful |
| Given | Received | Shared |
| Father | Son | Spirit |
One could study this table and gradually draw out much of what the book has to say. But, since I am here to do good service, I’ll do some of the drawing out myself.
Grammar he connects to “remembering”. The object of understanding is not simply linguistic grammar, but the grammar of being, the logic of things. “To fill a word with meaning is an act of remembering the being of the thing itself“. Grammar grounds us in what is real, as the foundation of our thought. We give names to things, and though the names themselves are conventions, the things named are not. “Naming is related to the power of seeing; of seeing into the realities, the essences of things.” Nominalists cannot be grammarians.
Language is also our medium for passing on what we know, and thus for the formation of a tradition. To be inducted into a tradition through education is an act of remembering, and a tradition is to be received in a receptive spirit of love, as a gift of something precious. “The ‘spirit of tradition’ is an essential element of education.” We, of course, live in a time when traditions are faltering and dissolving, when amnesia is the objective, and therefore we must be deliberate about guarding and teaching the good things we have inherited. This handing-on, this giving of a tradition to a new generation, is also a personal act, directed to the good of both teacher and pupil. In an anti-tradition, Caldecott argues, the world is simply a pattern of information to be transferred to a new mind. It has no personal element, and is not addressed to the soul, and this is deficient. We should therefore be wary of technologies that make teaching impersonal, or that intrude into the personal connections that constitute a tradition.
Central to the grammar of remembrance is the cultivation of memory and attention, both as indispensable requirements for retention of what is learned, but also as a means of integrating the personality and preparing in the pupil the road to contemplation. This was why Simone Weil was so devoted to attention as the aim of education: because attention is essential to contemplative prayer, and to the intuition of being which is at the heart of a grounded knowledge of the grammar of things. Students will make progress through learning by heart, and also through participation in the arts: in crafts, drama, song, story, and, especially, liturgy, which (in theory) brings these individual arts to an apex:
“If the spirit of tradition is to be preserved and revived, liturgy is going to be the key, for this is the school of memory, the place where we recollect ourselves, where we learn how to relate to each other in God. This is where we learn to accept the past and existence itself as a gift calling for a response of gratitude. Prayer and worship are therefore not extraneous but should be a central element in the life of the school or family. As we pray, so shall we be.”
The second part of the trivium, Dialectic, which is usually interpreted as ‘thinking’ or ‘reasoning’, Caldecott frames as the art of analysis and of discerning the truth. It rightly builds on the earlier stage, being informed by memory and the contemplation of what is real. (This in contrast to, say, Descartes, who began with dialectic, or, rather, began with forgetting, and tried to establish dialectic on a correspondingly thin foundation.) For Caldecott, dialectic is not cold reason, but proceeds in concert with both imagination and feeling, and is always grounded in a sober engagement with real things. Thinking is ‘thinking about’, and its characteristic mode is pondering, not flitting from one thing to the next.
The third stage of the trivium is Rhetoric, traditionally understood as the art of speaking, and especially of persuasion. In this stage one marshals one’s knowledge of things (“Grammar”) and one’s arguments and understanding (“Dialectic”) and conveys them to others with the intention of helping them to see and understand the same truths. Or, put in a more personal vein, by an education in the previous two stages we mature into a certain type of person, and in this third stage who we are, persons formed by a tradition, is communicated to others. Rhetoric makes use of all the resources of language — its music, its imagery, and its web of connotation — to convey truth. Because of its public, performative aspect it is closely related to song and music, and, even more deeply, to liturgy. Caldecott sees this appearance of liturgy as the telos of, or at least as the mature expression of, the educational process as highly significant, for liturgy, at its best, manifests a tradition of truths through a web of symbolic meanings of great rhetorical power. Naturally (and properly) this rhetorical power retains influence over us only so long as we understand or trust it to be grounded in truth. For these reasons, Caldecott sees the Mass as “intrinsic to the educational process itself”.
**
Following this overview of the basic structure and meaning of the trivium at a theoretical level, Caldecott transitions in the later chapters to practical questions of how these ideas might be instantiated in the day-to-day education of real children. The trivium forms the core of a classical liberal arts education, which was traditionally an elite project contrasted with a “servile” (or practical) education. But Caldecott points out that the Christian tradition, especially perhaps through the example of the Benedictines, who dedicated themselves to prayer, study, and manual labour, has relativized this hierarchy of “liberal” and “servile”, and that therefore today the liberal arts should be brought, insofar as is possible, to all.
The trivium describes ways of engaging with a subject, but does not specify what the subject should be. (The quadrivium is more prescriptive.) Caldecott proposes three subjects, broadly conceived: nature, culture, and Scripture, and he sketches a curriculum consisting of storytelling, music, exploration (“The study of nature through direct contact with gardens, animals, and wilderness is indispensable”), drawing, dance, drama, and sport. He cautions, wisely, that much reading absent personal experience to which to relate that reading can be fruitless, which is why he recommends balancing book learning with social activities, outdoor activities, and unstructured time for imaginative play. Yet reading is important, and he gives central place to both it and music — reading to children and playing music to them when they are young, and then transitioning them to self-guided engagement with books and music as they grow. They should read good books. (Quoting Charlotte Mason, he writes, “Children have a right to the best we possess; therefore their lesson books should be, as far as possible, our best books.”) He caused my heart to rejoice, casting a kind of in media res benediction over the many hours I have spent and will spend reading aloud to my kids, with this summation:
It makes sense to regard reading stories aloud to one’s children the archetypal act of the Trivium. One is simultaneously remembering a tradition, revealing the Logos, and (by voice, inflection, and gesture) dramatizing a story to communicate that meaning ‘heart to heart’.
Amen to that. In fact, the book seemed to be building toward a peroration of warm, happy contentment when suddenly, in the closing pages, he surprised me by recommending “unschooling” as a reasonable, and even, in some ways, particularly Catholic approach to education! Unschooling is a minority practice among homeschoolers in which children follow no prescribed curriculum but rather follow their own interests, managing their own time as they think best, and learning whatever they happen to learn. This comes back to the discussion at the beginning about the relative merits of prescriptive and elucidative models of education, and to my own instincts for the prescriptive side, I suppose, but I’ve always regarded unschooling as being somewhere between imprudent and idiotic. Caldecott, in an interesting rhetorical move, compares unschooling to NFP, something “regarded by many as an impractical ideal or an ideology, but when practiced in the right spirit it reveals itself as something else entirely”. Well, maybe. But maybe not.
**
There is much to admire about this book. I have not before encountered a book so thoughtful about the structure and significance of the classical trivium. The fact that it is not just a book of theory, but also an attempt to realize its ideas in practical form is also admirable, although I do think that its efforts in that direction are more suggestive than fully satisfactory, consisting of rather “normal” fruit plucked from the unusually rich philosophical reflections that produced it. But then, what did I expect?
**
“Christian education should be wider, not narrower, than that of a secular school.”
[A mother’s smile]
The infant is brought to consciousness of himself only by love, by the smile of his mother. In that encounter, the horizon of all unlimited being opens itself to him, revealing four things to him: (1) that he is one in love with the mother, even in being other than his mother, therefore all being is one; (2) that that love is good, therefore all Being is good; (3) that that love is true, therefore all Being is true; and (4) that that love evokes joy, therefore all Being is beautiful. (Von Balthasar, from My Work in Retrospect; quoted p.134-5)
The Clashing Rocks
Ian Serraillier
(Oxford, 1963)
96 p.
My ongoing, fits-and-starts project to find good versions of the classic Greco-Roman stories for my children brought me to this re-telling of the tale of Jason and the Argonauts. A few years ago I read, and mostly disliked, an adaptation of the same story by Padraic Colum, and I hoped for better things from Ian Serraillier, who in my experience is consistently good.
And he is good here. Not great, but good. The story begins with Jason’s wish to marry Medea, and her father’s tasking him with recovering the Golden Fleece before the nuptials can be celebrated. We follow him and his companions through all of their adventures, and Serraillier, unlike Colum, also tells us how badly things turned out for Jason and Medea in the end.
The problem is that there is too much story here for such a brief book. The narrative moves briskly from one episode to another, and there’s not enough space to develop the characters, or really to develop stakes. At one point Heracles and another Argonaut get left behind on an island; this is mentioned almost in passing, and we never hear from them again. New characters pop up, are named, do something, and then disappear again. I understand that this is an odyssey, and is therefore episodic by nature, but I’d have preferred a more patient rendering. Instead, I found myself reading without much investment. It’s still a fine book that I’ll recommend to my kids, but the quest for my Golden Fleece continues.
This edition includes excellent illustrations by William Stobbs.
A few interesting items I’ve stumbled upon in the last few weeks:
For an envoi, here is Bob Dylan singing “To Ramona”, live in Manchester in 1965:
I recently watched this interesting BBC documentary on sacred relics and reliquaries. Like many such productions, it has the whiff of anthropology about it, as though this, our own still-living tradition, was that of an alien people (which, I know, is how it would seem to some significant section of the audience), but it’s worth persevering in order to see the wonderful relics they examine, including one of St Edmund Campion and another of Blessed Edward Oldcorne, both English martyrs. The reliquaries, especially a tiny one built to house one of the thorns of Christ’s crown, are breathtaking in their intricate beauty. I found it all both interesting and edifying. The duration is about 1 hour.
The Song of Roland
Anonymous
Translated from the Old French by Dorothy Sayers
(Penguin Classics, 1957) [c.1100]
206 p.
The army of Charlemagne, having successfully laid siege to Saragossa, was returning home to France, its rear guarded by Roland and his companions, when, in a narrow mountain pass, they were treacherously set upon by the Islamic forces that had just surrendered to them. The Christians fought valiantly against greatly superior numbers, and went down to a glorious defeat. Their heroic stand became renowned, with the name of their leader unfurled like a banner over the long reconquest of Spain in succeeding centuries. The story was told many times, with many variations, but the present poem, written by an anonymous but accomplished poet, achieved, I gather, something like authoritative status.
We are in the realm of epic poetry. Our poet sings of the bravery and strength of his heroes, of their superhuman powers of endurance and supreme fighting skills. When we see treachery, it is a grand treachery; when we see loyalty, it is a stirring loyalty. We see nothing by half measures. Still, the poet leaves room for some defects of character in his principals. Roland, especially, is portrayed as brave, but confident to a fault, bordering on hubris, and his self-assurance in the face of overwhelming odds leads to his downfall.
Half-measures apply least of all to the violence of the poem, which is plentiful and plain:
Wondrous the battle, and it grows faster yet;
The French fight on with rage and fury fell,
They lop off wrists, hew ribs and spines to shreds,
They cleave the harness through to the living flesh;
On the green ground the blood runs clear and red. (126)
Even the Archbishop, Turpin, is a fighting man, who rides to battle with sword and spear in hand. Here he confronts one of the lesser Islamic leaders, Corsablis:
His golden spurs he strikes into his steed,
And rides against him right valiant for the deed.
He breaks the buckler, he’s split the hauberk’s steel,
Into his breast driven the lance-head deep,
He spits him through, on high his body heaves,
And hurls him dead a spear’s length o’er the lea.
Earthward he looks and sees him at his feet,
But yet to chide him he none the less proceeds:
“Vile infidel, you lied between your teeth!
Charles my good lord to help us will not cease,
Nor have our French the least desire to flee.
These friends of yours stock-still we’re like to leave;
Here’s news for you — you’ll die, and there you’ll be.” (95)
As the Archbishop’s presence testifies, this conflict is explicitly a clash of religions. When the Christians achieve their final victory (as they do), they proceed to smash the mosques (and, for good measure, the synagogues) and force their captives to be baptized — all except the Islamic queen, whom Charlemagne wishes to convert by persuasion. The poem evinces no doubts about the propriety of this course, and certainly no irony. At the same time, the poet seems startlingly ill-informed about the nature of Islam; on numerous occasions he refers to the Muslims as polytheists who worship “Mahound, Apollyon, and Termagant”. Who Termagant might be, I’ve no idea.
Regardless, it is clear that God fights on the side of the Christians. When Roland is beset with troubles, the whole of France is troubled by storms and earthquakes. Charlemagne is granted illuminating dreams that reveal the schemes of his enemies, and the angel Gabriel visits him.
The form of the poem is flexible: it consists of several hundred short sections, or laisses, each of which contains an indefinite number of lines, with the only requirement being that the lines be metrical and that the line endings in each laisse be consonant, having the same dominant vowel (rather than a strict rhyme). This works extremely well, and I found myself greatly enjoying the sound of the poem. Consider, for instance, this culminating passage about the death of Roland:
The County Roland lay down beneath a pine;
To land of Spain he’s turned him as he lies,
And many things begins to call to mind:
All the broad lands he conquered in his time,
And fairest France, and the men of his line,
And Charles his lord, who bred him from a child;
He cannot help but weep for them and sigh.
Yet of himself he is mindful betimes;
He beats his breast and on God’s mercy cries:
“Father most true, in whom there is no lie,
Who didst from death St Lazarus make to rise,
And bring out Daniel safe from the lions’ might,
Save Thou my soul from danger and despite
Of all the sins I did in all my life.”
His right-hand glove he’s tendered unto Christ,
And from his hand Gabriel accepts the sign.
Straightway his head upon his arm declines;
With folded hands he makes an end and dies.
God sent to him His Angle Cherubine,
And great St Michael of Peril-by-the-Tide;
St Gabriel too was with them at his side;
The County’s soul they bear to Paradise. (176)
It is true that I’m not enamoured of some of Sayers’ choices here — in particular her hokey-sounding metrical crutches, like “County” for “Count”, and her penchant for archaisms in a pinch — but basically I like the way the consonant end-stoppings pile up, giving the poem momentum and a certain musicality.
You’ll note from this most recent passage that Roland dies in comparative peace, rather than in battle. Here the poet solves a tricky problem, for his hero has to die, but, as a hero, he can’t simply be killed in combat. In fact, Roland’s death is due to his own over-exertion, he having exploded his veins by blowing too vigorously on his horn.
The blowing of that horn has summoned Charlemagne’s army to return, and, though they arrive too late to save Roland and his companions, they do pursue, overtake, and defeat the retreating Islamic army. In the final act of the poem, the French return to home and the traitor, Ganelon, who betrayed them to the Muslims out of spite toward Roland, stands trial. Thus the poem covers the full arc of Roland’s story.
And we have to put the emphasis on “story”, because the poem apparently bears little resemblance to actual history, even in its broad outlines. It is true that Charlemagne’s army besieged Saragossa in the year 778, but unsuccessfully, and in collaboration with one Islamic faction against another, and it is true that during their return to France, on 15 August of that year, their rear-guard was ambushed and slaughtered, but by Basques, not Muslims, during which ambush Roland, a duke of Brittany, was among the dead. How that rather minor episode in military history grew in the course of time to flower in the legendary battle of Roland against the Saracens is a mystery, though a happy one. The poem teaches us about the relationship of Christians and Muslims a millennium ago, but not much about real historical events of the eighth century.
I greatly enjoyed reading the poem. In my mind, it compares favourably with El Cid, being better structured, and more exciting, and having better characters. I have the feeling that I’d like a tougher, somewhat less mellifluous translation, but I’m not aware of any such.
**
Addendum: Reading in Henry Adams’ Mont St Michel and Chartres, which has a wonderful chapter on The Song of Roland, Adams gives us this appraisal:
No modern opera or play ever approached the popularity of the “Chanson.” None has ever expressed with anything like the same completeness the society that produced it. Chanted by every minstrel,—known by heart, from beginning to end, by every man and woman and child, lay or clerical,—translated into every tongue,—more intensely felt, if possible, in Italy and Spain than in Normandy and England,—perhaps most effective, as a work of art, when sung by the Templars in their great castles in the Holy Land,—it is now best felt at Mont-Saint- Michel, and from the first must have been there at home.
The Pleasures of Reading in an Age of Distraction
Alan Jacobs
(Oxford, 2011)
162 p.
Jacobs writes about the pleasures of reading, to be sure, but as a whole the book is more interrogative than simply appreciative. He wants to ask himself certain questions, and he invites us to ask ourselves the same: how do we decide what to read? how do we relate to what we are reading? how do we form judgments about what we read? why do we read in the first place?
As to how we decide what to read, he is resolute in his opposition to prescriptive reading lists. He is, one might say, prescriptive against prescription. Taking Adler and Van Doren as a foil, he argues, with moderate success, that ambitions to read “great books” are usually misguided, mostly because they outsource literary judgement and because they proceed on the basis of obligation rather than pleasure. If your reading consists in a great project to “get through” a list of classics, just for the sake of having done so, your reading is immature, impersonal, and not fun.
Instead, Jacobs recommends reading “under the sign of Whim”. Read what you want. Find books or authors that you enjoy, and follow the threads of connections with other books, authors, genres, and styles. Follow your nose. Do not let anyone else assign or evaluate your reading. His ideal of Whim is not thoughtless or arbitrary, but guided by literary judgement and self-knowledge. You should read what your soul desires.
This contrast between dutiful and whimsical readers is less sharp in real life than in the abstract, and Jacobs does take time to explore the complexities. Lists of great books can be helpful to readers who feel that there is something missing from their reading, who want a new challenge. And devotion to Whim can be narrowing, as he acknowledges. He cites the example of Edward Gibbon, who lived with regret at having not read better books when young, on account of his not knowing what the good books were. So perhaps the great books should be treated rather like seeds: fertile starting points, from which shoots and branches of reading grow.
But, all the same, despite the nod of deference he makes toward the “greats”, his aversion to planned or structured or prescribed reading is radical:
“I truly think I would rather read an indifferent book on a lark than a fine one according to schedule and plan.”
To which I can only respond with an awkward silence. Or maybe not: time is limited, and decisions must be made. It only makes sense to deliberate about how one will spend one’s time, in reading as in anything else, and, having deliberated and prioritized, it’s simple good sense to follow through. This, at any rate, is how I decide what to read: I ponder, weigh, investigate, consult, prioritize, and proceed according to plan. The plan is not set in stone, but it does have a certain authority. I would never rather read an indifferent book over a fine one, under any circumstances, if I can help it.
A separate set of questions crops up when we think about how we read. We read newspapers (if we read them at all) differently from novels, and novels differently from poetry. Jacobs distinguishes reading for information, for understanding, and for pleasure. In some cases we stand in judgment over a book as we read, but in others we sit at its feet, ready to be instructed or transported; the trick is knowing when each is appropriate. He cites Machiavelli’s attitude toward the great authors of the past:
“When evening has come, I return to my house and go into my study. At the door I take off my clothes of the day, covered with mud and mire, and I put on my regal and courtly garments; and decently reclothed, I enter the ancient courts of ancient men, where, received by them lovingly, I feed on the food that alone is mine and that I was born for.”
For Jacobs a principal fruit of reading is silence, both interior and exterior, and one of the best motives for a consistent practice of reading is to cultivate this silence. Books foster attentiveness: “books are the natural and inevitable and permanent means of being absorbed in something other than the self”. He proposes as an ideal the experience of a child lost in a book, rapt. Not all reading can calls forth or deserves deep attention, but the best reading — reading for pleasure — does. Following the advice of Hugh of St Victor’s Didascalicon, he describes the experience of attentive rumination on a worthy text in which the reader returns to specific passages, arguing with them, or appreciating their savour. As a means of cultivating this practice, and of slowing down our reading, Jacobs recommends that we read, re-read, and memorize poetry.
Reflections on silence and attention naturally introduce the book’s minor theme: our age of distraction. Jacobs wants to engage the genuine concerns many people have over their sense of being harried, inattentive, and unfocused. In fact the book itself is partially pitched to those who used to be avid readers but somehow can’t muster the energy anymore. He offers no jeremiad; he is himself a blogger, and a twit, and he is candid about his affection for his Kindle reader. At the same time, he sees the problems these technologies bring with them, and he is at least willing to entertain the possibility that the best course is simply to shut it all off, or, if not, to at least regain control over what occupies our attention. He cites with approval this from David Foster Wallace:
“Twenty years after my own graduation, I have come gradually to understand that the liberal arts cliché about teaching you how to think is actually shorthand for a much deeper, more serious idea: learning how to think really means learning how to exercise some control over how and what you think. It means being conscious and aware enough to choose what you pay attention to and to choose how you construct meaning from experience. Because if you cannot exercise this kind of choice in adult life, you will be totally hosed.”
Indeed.
As the book draws to a close, Jacobs turns his attention to how we evaluate books, and how our relationships with books can change over time. He gives some lovely anecdotes, as, for instance, about how Auden found his views on Kierkegaard changing over the course of his lifetime. In order to have such relationships, which are a means by which we can chart our own growth in maturity, it is necessary to re-read those books that have been important to us.
Speaking of Auden, Jacobs quotes his brief primer on critical judgments we might make about a book (or, for that matter, a film, or a piece of music, or any work of art):
“I can see this is good and I like it; I can see this is good but I don’t like it; I can see this is good, and, though at present I don’t like it, I believe with perseverance I shall come to like it; I can see that this is trash but I like it; I can see that this is trash and I don’t like it.”
It would be perverse if a book on the pleasures of reading were not itself a pleasure to read, but there is no danger of that here. Jacobs is an engaging writer. The tone is conversational, the book moves briskly across the terrain it needs to cover, and he salts his text with just enough exasperating and ill-conceived counsel that it held my attention throughout.
All Manner of Thing 