More Chrysostom on Child Rearing

Go to this pdf for a translation of Chrysostom's An Address on Vainglory and The Right Way for Parents to Bring Up Their Children.   He explains how to tell a bible story to children, compares the child's soul to a city, urges discipline and self sufficiency, and prohibits children from attending the theater among other excellent advice.

He concludes,

"Young men are troubled by desire, women by love of finery and excitement. Let us therefore repress all these tendencies. Thus we shall be able to please God by rearing such athletes for Him, that we and our children may light on the blessings that are promised to them that love Him (cf. I Corinthians 2:9), by the grace and mercy of our Lord Jesus Christ, to Whom with the Father and the Holy Spirit be ascribed glory, power, and honor, now and for evermore. Amen."

de Maistre on Mothers

"It is for our sex, undoubtedly, to form geometers, tacticians, chemists, etc.; but for what is called the man, that is to say the moral man, is perhaps formed by the age of ten; and if it has not been done on the knees of his mother, it will always be a great misfortune.  Nothing can replace this education.  If the mother especially has made it a duty to imprint the divine character deeply on the brow of her son, one can be quite sure that the hand of vice will never efface it.  The young man can go astray, undoubtedly, but he will experience, if you will permit me this expression, a returning curve that will lead back to the point where he began."

They have no door to their house

Some brothers were coming from Scetis to see Abba Anthony. When they were getting into a boat to go there, they found an old man who also wanted to go there. The brothers did not know him. They sat in the boat, occupied by turns with the words of the Fathers, Scripture and their manual work. As for the old man, he remained silent. When they arrived on shore they found that the old man was going to the cell of Abba Anthony too. When they reached the place, Anthony said to them, "You found this old man a good companion for the journey?" Then he said to the old man, " You have brought many good brethren with you, father." The old man said, "No doubt they are good, but they do not have a door to their house and anyone who wishes can enter the stable and loose the ass." He meant that the brethren said whatever came into their mouths. - 18th saying of St. Anthony

A Near Perfect Assignment

"The teacher chose a subject taken sometimes from religion, sometimes from moral subjects, or even from fables, and proposed it to his students.  He said, for instance: Midas obtained from the gods the grace that everything he touched would change into gold: amplify, Messieurs, the disadvantages of this mad demand.  Every young man could see them well as a whole, but each put in the degree of imagination with which he had been provided, and became accustomed to seeing an object from all possible angles.  All these amplifications being done and given to the teacher to read, he showed his disciples what grace and richness Ovid had treated that subject, and it was a new lesson."

Literature and the Positively Beautiful

From a letter from Dostoevsky to his niece in 1868:

The main idea of the novel is to present a positively beautiful man. This is the most difficult subject in the world, especially as it is now. All writers, not just ours, but European writers, too, have always failed whenever they attempted a portrait of the positively beautiful. Because the task is so infinite. The beautiful is an ideal, but both our ideal and that of civilized Europe are still far from being shaped. There is only one positively beautiful person in the world, Christ, and the phenomenon of this limitlessly, infinitely beautiful person is an infinite miracle in itself. (The whole Gospel according to John is about that: for him the whole miracle is only in the incarnation, in the manifestation of the beautiful.) But I am going too far. I’d only mention that of all the beautiful individuals in Christian literature, one stands out as the most perfect, Don Quixote. But he is beautiful only because he is ridiculous. Dickens’ Mr. Pickwick (who is, as a creative idea, infinitely weaker than Don Quixote but still gigantic) is also ridiculous but that is all he has to captivate us. Wherever compassion toward ridiculed and ingenious beauty is presented, the reader’s sympathy is aroused. The mystery of humor lies in this excitation of compassion.