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- Herausgeber: IVP Academic
- Kategorie: Religion und Spiritualität
- Sprache: Englisch
What is the purpose and meaning of classical education? Imagine a world where education isn't just about information transfer but about shaping the soul, where students are nurtured to become virtuous, morally self-regulating citizens. Passing the Torch makes an energetic case for the critical role of classical Christian education in today's world. From the pre-Christian musings of Plato to the modern reflections of C. S. Lewis, Passing the Torch intertwines the wisdom of diverse epochs to argue for an educational renaissance grounded in classical Christian values. Passing the Torch takes educators and parents on a literary and philosophical pilgrimage that includes: - Bibliographic Essays: Each essay serves as a gateway to key texts and influential thinkers, making it an invaluable guide for educators and homeschooling parents alike. - Close Readings: Delve into thoughtful examinations of pivotal figures such as Augustine, Rousseau, and Dorothy Sayers offering an intimate understanding of the moral and educational imperatives they championed. - Passionate Advocacy: Passing the Torch ignites a fervor for the value and necessity of classical Christian education that is both infectious and inspiring. In an era where educational paradigms often prioritize technological proficiency over moral formation, Passing the Torch is a call to return to the roots of classical Christian education. "Reflecting on the writings of literary and philosophical giants from Plato and Augustine to C.S. Lewis and Dorothy Sayers, Markos makes a strong case for the benefits of classical education over the modern public education system." – Library Journal Review, April 2025
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THIS BOOK IS DEDICATED TO
JODEY HINZE, DEAN OF HUMANITIES,
EMILY STELZER, ASSOCIATE DEAN,
AND MARYBETH BAGGETT, CHAIR OF ENGLISH,
for their continued support of me and my work,
and for fighting hard to preserve and provide
a true classical Christian liberal arts education that fosters
WISDOM, VIRTUE, AND ELOQUENCE
Contents
Preface
FEW AMERICANS TODAY WILL DISPUTE that our system of education is broken, ineffective, and in crisis. Students progress from grade level to grade level and then graduate high school with little knowledge, fewer skills, and even fewer virtues. They are as unprepared for the academic rigors of college as they are for the practical demands of the workforce or the physical and emotional sacrifices necessary for marriage and the raising of children.
Remedies for this crisis tend to come in one of two forms. Either utilitarian methods of pedagogy and classroom management are instituted that promise to order and regiment schools as if they were factories, or sociopolitical agendas are imposed that promise to unite students under a common progressive cause. Unfortunately, most of those conservative-marketplace methods and liberal-ideological agendas are cut off from the wise and stable traditions of the past, unmoored from the very things that have made and will continue to make us human. While the methods more often than not prevent real engagement with goodness, truth, and beauty, the agendas have the effect, whether intended or not, of setting students in opposition to the tradition rather than encouraging them to preserve that which is good, true, and beautiful in the legacy passed down to them by their forefathers.
What is needed is not more methods and agendas but a refocusing on what education is and what it should do. I could be, technically speaking, the finest surgeon in the world, but if I do not know the proper function of the heart or the brain or the lungs, my attempts at operating on those organs will likely result in great harm to my patient. All things, Aristotle argued, have a telos, a purposeful end, which defines their essence and guides their growth. Both education itself and the children who are educated possess a telos that must be understood and heeded if one generation is to properly pass down its knowledge and its culture to the next.
In chapter one of The Abolition of Man, C. S. Lewis, writing during World War II, sums up succinctly the difference between an educational system that knows the proper telos of education and one that does not:
Where the old [traditional form of education] initiated, the new merely “conditions.” The old dealt with its pupils as grown birds deal with young birds when they teach them to fly: the new deals with them more as the poultry-keeper deals with young birds—making them thus or thus for purposes of which the birds know nothing. In a word, the old was a kind of propagation—men transmitting manhood to men: the new is merely propaganda.
All the methods and agendas in the world will not restore education to its proper function until we are willing to ask again what that function is; but we will not be able to determine what that function is until we reclaim a proper understanding of whom that education is for. If we begin from a purely Darwinian view of man as a product of undirected time and chance with no essential nature or transcendent purpose, then we will treat the children in our schools as animals on a farm or cogs in a machine to be herded, manipulated, and reengineered.1 If we begin from a purely Rousseauian view of man as innately good but corrupted by society, then we will do all we can to protect students from feeling shame while removing from them all moral (and instructional) accountability and inflating their self-esteem in an individually and societally destructive manner.
The situation is a grave one, and I propose to address it in a three-step fashion. In my introduction, I will define and celebrate man as a human person endowed with innate dignity and worth but fallen and in need of limits, rules, and discipline. I shall treat him as a rational, emotional, and volitional creature whose choices shape his feelings and determine his habits, and who must have his virtues cultivated, his affections trained, and his desires ordered. I will treat him further as a dramatic, passionate, creative being impelled to bring order, harmony, and beauty out of the chaos around him.
Only after defining our essential human nature in its adult and adolescent phases will I be ready to move on to part one and address directly the subject of education. Given who we are as people, what kind of pedagogical methods will best allow us to pass down the wisdom of our culture to our children? How shall we best train their minds to live as full human beings who should and must wrestle with the eternal questions? What books should they read and activities should they engage in if they are to grow to become virtuous, morally self-regulating citizens?
Rather than create this needed educational vision out of whole cloth, I will look back to a traditional form of pedagogy that flourished during the Middle Ages and Renaissance and that provided the foundation for the university. That traditional form, which has seen a resurgence over the last three decades, goes by the name of classical Christian education. Though many prefer the phrase “Christian classical” because it (seemingly) puts the emphasis on the first word, I would contend that the second word is the more important one. If I were asked to identify my pedagogical orientation, I would respond that I am a Christian educator. If I were then asked what kind of Christian educator I am, I would respond that I am a classical Christian educator.
Having laid out a classical Christian vision for education, I will then develop that vision in part two by putting myself in direct dialogue with such influential educators as Plato, Augustine, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, John Dewey, Mortimer Adler, and C. S. Lewis. Rather than praise some and demonize others, I will seek to sift out the wheat from the chaff, the perennial from the merely fashionable.
Although Lewis was a Christian apologist who defended the faith boldly and well in such books as Mere Christianity, The Problem of Pain, and Miracles, when he wrote The Abolition of Man, he chose to confine himself to the kind of general revelation that is available to all people at all times and in all cultures. Like Lewis, I am a Christian apologist who has written defenses of the faith. In this book, however, I will follow the model of The Abolition of Man and draw on the wisdom of a wide range of Christian, non-Christian, and pre-Christian thinkers.
Everything I say below about the nature of man and of education will be, so I trust, compatible with the Scriptures and with the creedal, orthodox theology of the church catholic, but it will also be grounded in the great tradition that began with the Jews in the East and the Greeks and Romans in the West, and united in the writings of Augustine to create the European Middle Ages and the Renaissance and to guide our Founding Fathers in the establishment of our nation. Because of that, I am confident that many readers who do not share my belief in the Trinity, incarnation, atonement, and resurrection will yet agree, as Plato and Aristotle did, that there are such things as objective standards of goodness, truth, and beauty and that those standards have or at least should have a direct bearing on the way we live our lives and educate our children.
Rather than bog down this book with notes and statistics or engage directly with social and political infighting, I will step back and take a broader look at our shared humanity and our collective desire to train up our children in wisdom and virtue. What is needed today is not another scheme dreamed up by reductive-minded social scientists or utilitarian-minded businessmen but a reclaiming and reimagining of who we are as human beings and what our duties are to the generations that came before us and to those that will carry on after us.
IntroductionThe Nature of Man
BEFORE WE CAN DETERMINE how children should be educated, we must determine who those children are as human beings. Here are ten aspects of our common humanity that have implications for the way we educate the next generation.
WE ARE NOBLE
In act 2, scene 2 of Hamlet, the prince of Denmark, freshly returned from his studies at the University of Wittenberg, gives voice to a gloriously high view of man that reverberated throughout the Renaissance: “What a piece of work is a man, how noble in reason, how infinite in faculties, in form and moving how express and admirable; in action how like an angel, in apprehension how like a god: the beauty of the world, the paragon of animals.”1
It is true that the melancholy prince follows his paean to man’s greatness by quipping, “And yet, to me, what is this quintessence of dust,” but I will defer his pessimistic coda to focus on what can be learned about the unique status of man in nature by parsing Hamlet’s speech phrase by phrase:
“What a piece of work is a man”: Man is a work of art, a creation that has been carefully crafted and lovingly fashioned. There is nothing in him that is random or haphazard. He is God’s workmanship (see Ephesians 2:10), and anyone who does not see that lacks eyes to see man’s inherent design.
“How noble in reason”: Unlike the animals, man has been endowed with reason, and that reason is the chief source of his nobility. There is a part of him that stands outside nature, that can in fact analyze, assess, and even alter it.
“How infinite in faculties”: Though there are individual animals that exceed him in their powers of sight, smell, hearing, taste, and touch, man possesses a wondrous combination of faculties that allows him to explore his world through a multitude of lenses.
“In form and moving how express and admirable”: Though, again, there are beasts that can run and swim, jump and swing with a dexterity that surpasses his abilities, there is a meaning and a beauty in his movements that speak of a greater harmony and proportion.
“In action how like an angel”: Though he shares qualities with the animal kingdom, there is a part of him that reaches upward to the angelic, that soars past the limits of his heavy physical body.
“In apprehension how like a god”: Not just angelic, there is a part of him that is truly divine, a kind of overarching vision that takes in all the world, from the lowest depths to the highest heavens.
“The beauty of the world”: Man is the crown of creation, so much so that all the wonders of nature find their completion in him.
“The paragon of animals”: He is the standard against which all other living creatures are measured.
Despite the ongoing efforts of modern thinkers such as Peter Singer to break down the dividing wall between humans and animals, the fact remains that man’s reason lifts him above the narrow confines of the natural world.2 Our reason is at once supernatural and metaphysical. It renders us unique in the animal kingdom, as does our ability to use our reason in coordination with our bodily senses and mental faculties.
We do not merely react to stimuli, as the behaviorist would have it, nor do we confine ourselves, as the empiricist would have it, to the evidence presented to our senses. Like animals, we move up, inductively, from causes to effects; unlike animals, we can also reason downward (deductively) from first principles that are engraved in our psyche rather than observed in the ever-shifting ephemera of nature. There are many animals that perform intricate bodily movements, but they do so for purely practical reasons: to evade predators or attract mates. Only man moves his body in accordance with an external standard that he perceives by his rational and aesthetic judgment and that he calls beauty.
Only man believes propositions because they are true, performs actions because they are good, and creates works of art because they are beautiful. Indeed, only man has the rational capacity to determine that some things are true and others false, some good and others evil, some beautiful and others ugly. In his philosophical, ethical, and aesthetic judgments, he so soars above the animals that he touches on the precincts of the angelic and even of the divine.
Truly, man is a marvel and a paragon; his connections to the natural world only highlight the many ways in which he transcends the clay out of which he was formed. Rightly does David exclaim with joy and wonder at how each individual human being is fearfully and wonderfully knit together in the womb of his mother (Psalm 139:13-14).
Such is man, and as such should he be treated: not merely as a product of unconscious material forces but as a creature endowed with purpose and design; not merely as a slave to natural instincts and primordial desires but as a rational and volitional agent whose choices affect his own destiny and that of the world; not merely as a means to some political or social or economic end but as an end in himself. There is no doubt that we are strongly shaped and influenced by our surroundings, but there is that within us which transcends those influences.
No pedagogical scheme, no theory of education, no initiative for training up the next generation can hope to succeed if it does not take into account the nobility of man: his reason, his freedom, his giftedness, his high status in nature. I do not mean to suggest there are nefarious American educators out there, whether utilitarian or progressive, who consciously deny man’s dignity, freedom, or rationality. I maintain, rather, that when educational institutions, whether public or private, secular or Christian, do not hold that vision at the center of their pedagogical goals, they risk reducing students to an army to be regimented, a workforce to be trained, a faction to be indoctrinated, a commodity to be molded, or a consumer to be conditioned.
Hear again the distinction Lewis makes in chapter one of The Abolition of Man:
Where the old [traditional form of education] initiated, the new merely “conditions.” The old dealt with its pupils as grown birds deal with young birds when they teach them to fly: the new deals with them more as the poultry-keeper deals with young birds—making them thus or thus for purposes of which the birds know nothing. In a word, the old was a kind of propagation—men transmitting manhood to men: the new is merely propaganda.
When educators forget or downplay the dignity of each student, they will be tempted to do things to them rather than for them. Rather than form them in a manner consistent with their unique and essential nobility, they will be tempted to form them in accordance with principles of utility or ideology that are foreign to that nobility.
WE ARE DEPRAVED
Educational schemes that do not take into account man’s nobility can be easily manipulated by corporate agendas or progressive ideologies to shape students for ends that violate their inherent worth and value. Pedagogical theories and initiatives, however, can be equally compromised if they deny that man, though noble, is fallen, broken, rebellious, and depraved. There is that within us that strives upward to the angelic, but there is also that within us that sinks downward to the beast—or the devil.
G. K. Chesterton hits the nail squarely on the head when he argues, in chapter two of Orthodoxy, that original sin, the belief that we have inherited a sinful nature from fallen, disobedient Adam, is the only doctrine of the Christian faith that can be proven. Just look around you; if you have the requisite courage and honesty, look at yourself. The greatest mystery of man is not that the same human race produced an Adolf Hitler and a Mother Theresa but that every one of us has a little Hitler and a little Mother Theresa wrestling within us.
It is not just that we think and say and do bad things; it is that there is a corruption at the core of our being. Like the apostle Paul, we do not do the good we know we should do, and we do the bad we know we should not (see Romans 7:18-23). We know that we do bad things, that we have violated a universal law that transcends time, place, and culture. We may claim that such a law does not exist, but we prove every day that we know it does, for we expect other people to treat us in accordance with that law.
The ancient Greco-Roman writers lacked a theological understanding of sin because they lacked the biblical revelation of a just and holy God against which to measure human sinfulness. Yet, that is not the whole story. The pagans knew full well that there were certain heinous acts that violated the divine order of the universe. Such taboo crimes brought bloodguilt on both the perpetrator and his community and called out for expiation.
In the Oedipus of Sophocles, those crimes are patricide and incest; in his Antigone, judgment falls on King Creon for leaving a dead body unburied (his nephew Polyneices) and burying a live one (his niece Antigone). Taboos abound in the Oresteia of Aeschylus: cannibalism, human sacrifice, matricide, and the treacherous murder of a husband by his wife. In the Bacchae, Medea, and Hippolytus of Euripides, a young man’s aunts and mother tear him to pieces, a mother murders her children to punish her unfaithful husband, and a woman unsuccessfully seduces and then bears false witness against a stepson before committing suicide. All of these taboo acts establish a situation that demands retribution and sacrifice.
James Frazer in the nineteenth century (The Golden Bough) and René Girard in the twentieth (Violence and the Sacred) document the ubiquity of scapegoat figures across human culture and their link to our deep-set notions of personal and communal guilt and impiety. We would not transfer our feelings of pride, lust, and envy to other individuals or groups if we did not recognize them in ourselves.
For the last two centuries, modern man has convinced himself of an evolutionary delusion: that we humans are somehow improving morally and will, at some point in the future, build a utopia. The Bible knows better, but then so did the ancient mythographers. Man, the Bible attests, did not struggle upward from animism to pantheism to polytheism to monotheism to science, but fell away from an original monotheism into myriad forms of idolatry. In Hesiod’s Theogony (lines 106-201) and Ovid’s Metamorphoses 1, man’s spiritual journey is not one of moral progress but of moral entropy.
Hesiod and Ovid did not have access to the biblical story of Eden, but they did look back to a golden age from which they believed man had fallen into successively less virtuous ages of silver, bronze, and iron. They did not need the prophet Jeremiah to tell them that “the heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked” (Jeremiah 17:9).
At the core of both Judeo-Christian doctrine and Greco-Roman tradition lies the foundational belief that the problem with man is willful sin, disobedience, and rebellion. This understanding of man as a moral agent who chooses to commit vicious acts persisted until the eighteenth-century Enlightenment, when Rousseau argued, in The Social Contract and Discourse on Inequality Among Men, that the problem with man is not sin, disobedience, and rebellion but ignorance, private property, and inequality. The problem for Rousseau lay with society’s corrupting influence, not with man’s inbuilt propensity for evil and depravity.
Writing in 1908, before World War I and the outbreak of totalitarian regimes from the right and the left dedicated to building utopias through the purging of subversive social elements and the pedagogical reconditioning of the rest, Chesterton prophetically warned that if “we wish to pull down the prosperous oppressor we cannot do it with the new doctrine of human perfectibility; we can do it with the old doctrine of Original Sin” (Orthodoxy, chap. 9).
Or, to put it in the words of Chesterton’s greatest disciple:
I am a democrat because I believe in the Fall of Man [that is, original sin]. I think most people are democrats for the opposite reason. A great deal of democratic enthusiasm descends from the ideas of people like Rousseau, who believed in democracy because they thought mankind so wise and good that everyone deserved a share in the government. . . . The real reason for democracy is just the reverse. Mankind is so fallen that no man can be trusted with unchecked power over his fellows.3
What has this deep-seated Greco-Roman/Judeo-Christian truth about human nature to do with education? If it is neglected, education can too easily morph into an instrument of social engineering, blinding students from their own depravity while waking them to the ineradicable evil of individuals or groups chosen by those in power to play the role of scapegoat. Rather than appeal to classical or Christian bulwarks against depravity—virtue, wisdom, tradition, duty—educators who deny original sin in their students and themselves run the risk of setting up new, utopian values and then using education to indoctrinate students in those values. Rather than put education in service to virtue, wisdom, tradition, and duty, those who deny human depravity are more likely to use education as a tool for conditioning and remaking, not restoring and strengthening, the souls and consciences of the next generation.
WE ARE INCARNATIONAL BEINGS
Man possesses a deep-set depravity that cannot be removed externally by the elimination of corrupt groups or individuals or internally by state-run education-as-conditioning. He also possesses an innate and essential dignity that must be respected by nations, governments, and schools alike. Still, even if we acknowledge both man’s nobility and his depravity, the danger remains that we will falsely link the first to our soul and the second to our body.
The most central and distinctive doctrine of Christianity is the incarnation: the belief that Jesus was not half man and half God, nor a man with a God consciousness, nor a God who appeared to be human, but fully human and fully divine, 100 percent man and 100 percent God. In an analogous way, we who bear the image of God (imago Dei in Latin) are not souls trapped in bodies or bodies animated by souls but beings who are fully physical and fully spiritual: in a word, enfleshed souls.
To preserve the purity of the doctrine of the incarnation, the early church fathers had to fend off two equal and opposite heresies: Arianism, which denied Jesus’ divinity, and Gnosticism, which denied his humanity. The second was particularly dangerous, for it promoted a worldview that not only rendered impossible the good news of God become man but deconstructed the unique nature of man and reality itself. For the Gnostics, the fall did not follow creation; creation was the fall. Matter, they believed, was intrinsically evil, the aborted handiwork of a lesser god.
Just as matter was inherently and irredeemably fallen, so was man’s flesh. Salvation necessitated the freeing of the soul from the dark prison house of the body. The Gnostics rejected the incarnation, for they believed, in keeping with their low view of matter, that if God had literally taken on flesh, as John 1:14 proclaims, he would have become unclean and sinful. In the same way, they identified man’s body as the source of the corruption of his soul.
Though doctrinaire Gnosticism is not particularly strong today, its low view of matter has helped to fuel an error—what I would call a soft heresy—that is ubiquitous across the Western world but especially in America. That error generally goes by the name of dualism; it consists of the—mostly unconscious—belief that our soul is good and our body is bad. Alfred Hitchcock’s 1960 film Psycho shocked audiences by brutally killing off its star in the first third of the movie. But that was not the only shock it delivered. It was also the first American film to allow audiences to see and hear a flushing toilet.
Most Americans, then and now, get squeamish when two topics are discussed: sex and the bathroom. If you do not believe me, just watch how uncomfortable an American gets when a European, unaware that he is supposed to use the euphemism bathroom, asks if he may use the toilet. What do sex and the bathroom have in common? Both force us to face our own physical, bodily nature—that part of us that is most like the beasts.
Though most Americans would not say outright that their body is inherently bad, most are embarrassed by it, finding it somehow distasteful. Their body is something to be overcome by willpower, a somewhat mythical force believed to reside in the soul. When Paul speaks of overcoming the flesh (Romans 7:5, 18, 25; 8:1-10), he means not our skin but the sinful nature that exists in both our fallen body and soul. But that does not prevent Americans (again, mostly unconsciously) from equating Paul’s “flesh” with our physical body and then setting out, futilely, to conquer it.
Consider what may be the best celebration of the American heart and ethos ever put on the silver screen: It’s a Wonderful Life. Frank Capra was by no means a heretical Christian, and yet in his film he dramatizes a commonly held misconception that directly contradicts the Christian doctrine of the resurrection of the body: namely that when we die, we become angels. Behind this misconception lies a belief that our true self is our soul, and that our body is just a covering that weighs us down now but that we will one day shuffle off. In heaven, we will be purely spiritual (angels); our “bad” body will no longer exercise dominion over our “good” soul.
Such dualistic thinking is not good for education, for it isolates the soul from the body, treating students as primarily mental beings who must beat their bodies into submission. This kind of thinking has proven particularly harmful to boys. As Christina Hoff Summers and Leonard Sax demonstrate in The War Against Boys: How Misguided Policies Are Harming Our Young Men (2000, 2015) and Boys Adrift: The Five Factors Driving the Growing Epidemic of Unmotivated Boys and Underachieving Young Men (2007, 2016), the public school system has hurt an increasing number of boys by seeking to repress their natural physicality and aggressiveness, even to the point of putting them on drugs that interfere with their developing brains and brand them unfairly as difficult students.4
Although the Department of Education’s 2000 report Trends in Educational Equity of Girls and Women showed clearly that boys, and not girls, were in educational crisis, the results of the study, Summers writes, were initially ignored by most women’s groups, journalists, educators, and public officials. Soon, however, the “phenomenon became impossible to ignore. Teachers observed male fecklessness and disengagement before their eyes, day after day in their classrooms. Parents began noticing that young women were sweeping the honors and awards at junior high and high school graduations, while young men were being given most of the prescriptions for attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder. College admissions officers were baffled, concerned, and finally panicked over the dearth of male applicants.”5 We are incarnational beings, not disembodied brains; any true education must take account of our physical/spiritual, amphibian nature. The war on boys that Summers and Sax document represents the bad fruit of a dualistic mindset that mistrusts the body and sees it as a hindrance to intellectual and spiritual growth.
How much better to envision a form of education that treats the bodies and souls of both boys and girls as integrally united: that treats them as whole people, not as immaterial persons contained in bodies that may or may not express their personhood. Such an education would not blind itself to the different temperaments and biological-hormonal makeups of its male and female students, nor would it excise gym class or recess time for utilitarian reasons. But it would do more than that. It would seek to teach wisdom, instill virtue, and promote growth in a way that joins word (logos) and action (praxis), belief and behavior, reason and volition. In such a school, life lessons would arise naturally out of discussions of literature, history, and philosophy.
WE ARE DUAL BEINGS
It is now time to consider Hamlet’s full speech on the nature of man: “What a piece of work is a man, how noble in reason, how infinite in faculties, in form and moving how express and admirable; in action how like an angel, in apprehension how like a god: the beauty of the world, the paragon of animals. And yet, to me, what is this quintessence of dust.”
Here, in this celebration that suddenly turns back against itself, we catch a glimpse of the strange creatures we are. Our dreams and accomplishments are rich with meaning and glory, yet our lives are brief and futile and leave no trace behind. We are at once the jewel in the crown of creation and a destructive mole on nature. Our reason makes us the noblest of all the beasts while enabling us to be, as Mark Twain once lamented, the only animal that is cruel.
Pascal expressed it best in number 434 of his Pensées (Thoughts): “What a chimera then is man! What a novelty! What a monster, what a chaos, what a contradiction, what a prodigy! Judge of all things, imbecile worm of the earth; depositary of truth, a sink of uncertainty and error; the pride and refuse of the universe!”6 Only if we understand and accept this paradox, only if we come to realize that we are a chaotic contradiction, a monstrous prodigy, will we be able to embrace the fullness of reality.
Although it is a dualistic heresy to identify our soul with goodness and our body with evil, it is nevertheless true that we possess a hybrid nature that partakes of the angelic as well as the beastly. It is further true that our soul bears a stronger similarity to the angels, as our body does to the beasts. We know deep down that we should be able to soar above this world of sin and depravity, but we also know that we cannot and that our physicality is part of what anchors us down. We are frustrated by our inability to align our body and soul toward a single good purpose, all the while feeling that we should be able to do so. How can this be?
Although the presence of injustice in the world is often used as an argument against God, it actually provides one of the strongest arguments for God’s existence. If there were no God, there would be no absolute, transcendent standard for what is just and what is not. If that standard did not exist, we would not know the world was unjust because we would have no touchstone against which to measure it. In a world of pure natural selection, where the strong as a matter of course devour the weak, there can be no such thing as justice and therefore no such thing as injustice.
The ineradicable sense we have of our perpetually warring duality—of our simultaneous capacity for good and evil, altruistic desires and primal urges, self-sacrificing heroism and self-serving villainy—can be explained only if we have a communal memory of a time of innocence against which we can compare our corruption. Had we no memory of our former innocence, we would have no sense of our present corruption. We would be like the animals who kill and are killed in an endless cycle, untroubled by remorse or a stinging sense that the world should not be as it is. The melancholy truth expressed by Francesca in Inferno 5 is ultimately true for all of us who remember just enough of our prelapsarian state to feel its loss: “The double grief of a lost bliss / is to recall its happy hour in pain.”7
In the same meditation from which I quoted above, Pascal argues that, although the mystery of original sin seems to us offensive and unjust, “Without this mystery, the most incomprehensible of all, we are incomprehensible to ourselves. The knot of our condition takes its twists and turns in this abyss, so that man is more inconceivable without this mystery than this mystery is inconceivable to man.”8 Nothing about our paradoxical, split-personality nature makes sense in the absence of a primal disobedience that tore us away from an original innocence and bliss that we cannot recover yet cannot shake off. Apart from that, we cannot account for the wrestling within us, the sense of our own duality as simultaneously creatures of the dark with a memory of our brief sojourn in the light, and creatures of the light who cannot untangle ourselves from the deeply woven darkness within.
If we ignore that duality, or, worse, try to explain it away as a psychological or sociological phenomenon, we will never truly face ourselves but will project our own sinful nature onto other people or parties or systems or ideologies. If we dwell on it overmuch, as Hamlet does, we will drive ourselves mad and lose the ability to act in a proper and healthy manner. If we take the middle course of acknowledging it but not brooding over it, we can make a move toward reconciling within ourselves the dark and the light, the beast and the angel.
Just so, educators who recognize the duality within their students and themselves will be better able to guide them along the path of wisdom and virtue. Rather than reduce knowledge to a bundle of facts or morality to a list of dos and don’ts, they will seek to align their students with the truth about our human nature. Education does not have the power to rip out the beast, nor should it. But it can and should appeal to (and draw out) what Abraham Lincoln, in his First Inaugural Address, called “the better angels of our nature.”
WE ARE MORAL AGENTS
But what if we could remove the beast from ourselves? What if we could discover some kind of secret knowledge that would lift us out of our enslavement to the body, to the physical world, to ignorance, to mortality? Would it be wise and virtuous to do so? It would not. According to Genesis 3, our original parents sacrificed their innocence, immortality, and direct fellowship with God to taste of the forbidden fruit of the knowledge of good and of evil. Even those who do not believe in Adam and Eve must recognize the great truth here. I say they must, for the human race keeps telling the same tale of what happens to those who pluck such fruit.
Consider Prometheus, who steals the fire of creativity from the gods and is tormented for a thousand years; Faust, who makes a pact with the devil to gain alchemical knowledge and comes quickly to regret the bargain; Dorian Gray, who sells his soul to the devil so that his portrait will bear the marks of his age and his infamy and equally comes to lament the exchange; Dr. Jekyll, who invents a potion that will free him from his dark side, only to be overcome by the darkness within; Dr. Frankenstein, who brings down destruction on himself and his family because of his mad desire to possess the secret of life; Dracula and the mummy, whose lust for immorality dooms them to wander the night as living corpses; and Gollum, who thinks that the Ring will open his eyes to hidden mysteries but is enslaved and consumed by it instead.
In addition to these characters who specifically pluck forbidden fruit, there are many others who commit a similar taboo crime: Cain, guilty of fratricide; Oedipus, guilty of patricide and incest; Orestes, guilty of matricide; Macbeth, guilty of murdering a guest; Heathcliff, guilty of loving and destroying his stepsister; Ahab, guilty of impiety and blasphemy in his search for the whale; Captain Nemo, guilty of killing innocent sailors in the name of peace; Don Juan, guilty of defying God’s laws in his adulteries; Richard Wagner’s Siegmund and Sieglinde, guilty of incestuous love; and Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s ancient mariner, guilty of killing the innocent albatross that saved his ship from the ice.
Romantic poet Lord Byron created so many of these characters that they are often referred to collectively as Byronic heroes. Manfred, Byron’s greatest creation, is a Faust-like antihero guilty of incest with his sister, defiance of God, and a desire to possess the power and wisdom of the spirit realm. In the opening scene of the play that is named for him, Manfred sums up in three weary lines of poetry how the quest for that which is forbidden leaves one empty and alone: “Sorrow is knowledge: they who know the most / Must mourn the deepest o’er the fatal truth, / The Tree of Knowledge is not that of Life.”
At the core of all Byronic heroes lies their failure to accept their dual nature. They try to surpass the limits of their flesh and/or their base, sinful nature only to find that in doing so they have cut themselves off from their fellow man and from their own humanity. In the process, they learn one simple truth about the sons and daughters of Adam and Eve: we are volitional beings, moral agents whose choices have short-term and long-term consequences. Free will, as we use it today, is too flimsy a phrase to capture how deeply we are shaped by our decisions and actions, how they determine the lives we lead and the people we become.
Body affects soul as soul affects body, a result of our incarnational nature as enfleshed souls and our duality as noble-but-fallen creatures whose twin capacities for goodness and wickedness are so closely woven together that they cannot be separated. Educational institutions that do not take seriously our moral nature and the consequences that follow on our choices will produce educators who think their role is to set their students free to think for themselves rather than to think prudentially. Neither teachers nor their students can rebel without ramifications or act without accountability. We live in a natural and moral world of cause and effect, where the consequences of our choices are as hard and real and concrete as the laws of gravity or of entropy.
The role of education is not to produce Byronic heroes who are unafraid to breach any and all social, sexual, and scientific mores but to instill in students a sense of their proper limits and of how the choices they make in school will determine the course of their lives.
WE ARE HABITUAL BEINGS
As moral agents, we are responsible for our choices. That is a great and vital truth, but it is not the whole truth. To say only that we are responsible for our choices is to cast our moral nature in negative terms. We are not only creatures meant to flee vice; we are meant as well to pursue virtue. Depraved and fallen we may be, but we continue to possess both the desire and the capacity for virtue. But what is virtue, and how does one become a virtuous person?
In Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle famously argues that virtue does not come to us naturally but “comes about as a result of habit” (book 2, chap. 1).9 A brave man is not someone who feels brave. He becomes brave by acting on the feeling; he acquires the virtue of bravery by doing so repeatedly. It is “by doing the acts that we do in the presence of danger, and being habituated to feel fear or confidence, [that] we become brave or cowardly.” Effective “legislators make the citizens good by forming habits in them,” for they understand how the human machine works. It is not our feelings but our habitual actions that form us into virtuous people.
The same is true of effective educators. In harmony with his great teacher, with whom he did not always agree, Aristotle argues, “We ought to have been brought up in a particular way from our very youth, as Plato says, so as both to delight in and to be pained by the things that we ought; for this is the right education” (chap. 3). It is the role of parents, teachers, and culture alike to build up in the young proper reactions to that which is virtuous and that which is vicious. Only once those reactions have become so ingrained in the student that they become habitual can the student be said to be virtuous.
One of the best signs that a student has been properly trained in virtue is that when he deviates from the path of virtue, he feels guilty. By proper use of this internal feeling of guilt, traditional teachers have strengthened the habit of virtue within their students. Sadly, this central element of proper teaching has been replaced by a belief that students, and people in general, can only become heathy, balanced, and integrated if they overcome their feelings of guilt. Whether that guilt comes from our parents, the clergy, God, the state, society, or our own superego, it prevents us from liberating our true selves and becoming fully self-actualized.
This demonizing of guilt, which has convinced psychologists and psychiatrists across the Western world that they must affirm their patients even and especially when they have violated a traditional moral, ethical, or religious code, may just be the most destructive lie to come out of our therapeutic culture. Guilt is not the problem. It is the signal that there is a problem.10
Although no one enjoys experiencing physical pain, pain is a blessing that prevents us, quite literally, from falling apart. Pain is our body’s way of signaling to us that something is wrong with it that needs attention. If the pain is intense, it means that our body needs immediate attention. Only a fool would ignore intense pain coming from his head or chest or belly; only an incompetent doctor would wave off the pain without investigating for injury. If the doctor were unethical to boot and a lackey of the pharmaceutical companies, he might prescribe an expensive, self-perpetuating round of painkillers that would mask rather than cure the deeper medical problem.
Now, given that we are broken people living in a broken world, our body’s pain alarm is not flawless. If we contract a terrible disease or bodily injury that causes a malfunction in our nervous system, we will experience successive waves of unhealthy, unnatural pain for which our doctor will prescribe pain medication. In this case, the prescription is correct, for the pain is the problem and not merely a signal.
The same goes for guilt. Because of the evil in our world, people will often suffer traumatic experiences that leave them with some form of posttraumatic stress disorder. In such cases, the patient will often suffer from unnatural and unhealthy feelings of guilt that will need to be treated with drugs, counseling, or both. But in the natural course of things, we feel guilt not because wrong has been done to us
