The Necessity of Leisure

"Leisure is a form of that stillness that is necessary preparation for accepting reality; only a person who is still can hear, and whoever is not still, cannot hear.  Such stillness as this is not mere soundlessness or a dead muteness; it means, rather, that the soul's power, as real, of responding to the real - a co-respondence, eternally established in nature - has not yet descended into words.  Leisure is the disposition of receptive understanding, of contemplative beholding, and immersion - in the real."  (Leisure The Basis of Culture, Josef Pieper, page 31)

You may be covering material, memorizing, testing, computing, but unless you have leisure - "a disposition of receptive understanding, of contemplative beholding, and immersion" - you don't have true learning.

The Dark Ages and the Rise of Islam

What caused the end of the classical world?  Was it a decline from within, barbarian tribes from without, or as many Enlightenment thinkers proposed, the influence of Christians?  Emmet Scott argues that the classical world in the West continued right up to the beginning of the seventh century; with architectural achievements, high literacy rates, and Roman and classical modes of living.  Then abruptly at the beginning of the seventh century and continuing for the next three hundred years; building stopped, fertile ground around the Mediterranean was abandoned, people moved to hill top villages and castles, and the availability of papyrus was no more.  What accounts for this abrupt "dark age" in the history of the West?

In his fascinating book Mohammed & Charlemagne Revisited, Scott argues that the cause of this abrupt decline was Mohammed and the rise of Islam.  The perpetual and total war instituted by Islamic theology, including the Muslim pirates and slavers in the Mediterranean, brought classical civilization to a halt and inaugurated the Medieval world.   Scott marshals evidence from archaeology and other historic disciplines to update and give strength to the thesis of Henri Pirenne in his book also titled Mohammed & Charlemagne.  Filled with historical insight, almost every page has something to teach and his conclusion, which I won't reveal, will keep you thinking for a while.  Highly recommended.

A Cherubic Sword of Flame

"But You are stronger than the world, O Lord my God, and You will lend Your servant a cherubic sword of flame, with which I shall repel the onslaught of the world on my life."  St. Nikolai Velimirovich, Prayers by the Lake, prayer LXXVIII

The Importance of Stories for Children

“Deprive children of stories and you leave them unscripted, anxious stutterers in their actions as in their words.  Hence there is no way to give us understanding of any society, including our own, except through the stock of stories which constitute its dramatic resources.  Mythology, in its original sense, is at the heart of things.  Vico was right and so was Joyce.  And so too is that moral tradition from heroic society to its medieval heirs according to which the telling of stories has a key part in educating us into the virtues.”  Alistair MacIntyre, After Virtue

Genuine Education

    The product of a genuine education is an ordinate soul.  The ordinate soul is properly ordered to the hierarchy of being and value: it loves the lovable, desires the good, and admires the beautiful.
    Order is produced in the soul through the inculcation of habits that bind our pleasures to that which is good and our pains to that which is bad.
    A soul thus habituated is virtuous. (Mark Anderson, Pure)

Who is so stupidly curious....

For do teachers profess that it is their thoughts which are perceived and grasped by the students, and not the sciences themselves which they convey through thinking? For who is so stupidly curious as to send his son to school that he may learn what the teacher thinks?...Those who are pupils consider within themselves whether what has been explained has been said truly; looking of course to that interior truth, according to the measure of which each of us is able. Thus they learn, and when the interior truth makes known to them that true things have been said, they applaud... (St. Augustine, On the Teacher)

The Aim of Classical Education

The formation of a mature person who loves inquiry that reaches into earthly as well as transcendent realms of knowledge, who makes the connection between this knowledge and his responsibility in the life of virtue, and who struggles against long odds to fulfill in himself the high exigencies of the Ideal Type.  (David V. Hicks, Norms & Nobility)

The Art of Arts

To educate man is the art of arts, for he is the most complex and mysterious of all creatures.  (St. Gregory the Theologian)

The Pleasure of Reading

Reading in truth makes us more human; our pleasure in it is the best measure of any book’s worth because that pleasure’s depth signifies how profoundly we left ourselves and entered into the story and how much of the allegorical and sublime meaning we captured while our disbelief was suspended. (John Granger)

Hiawatha and Anthologies

Most poetry collections only include a portion of Hiawatha’s Childhood, just one chapter in the 22 chapter poem by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow.  We have a children’s picture book of that part, but I have never really “gotten into the story” much.  It’s about an Indian baby who learns the names of the animals from his grandmother and calls the birds, “Hiawatha’s chickens” and the animals, “Hiawatha’s brothers”.  It’s nice enough, but not really one I wanted to read over and over.  But after reading Longfellow’s other poems and especially the longer Evangeline, I decided to find and read the entire poem to the children during our after lunch poetry time.  I was quite surprised to find that, at our rate of 20-30 minutes per day for poetry, the poem will take us just over three weeks to finish.  But so far the time and effort have been well worth it.  The poem tells the story of Hiawatha, an Ojibwan Hercules.  Read the entire poem here.

Longfellow begins:

Should you ask me,
whence these stories?
Whence these legends and traditions,
With the odors of the forest
With the dew and damp of meadows,
With the curling smoke of wigwams,
With the rushing of great rivers,
With their frequent repetitions,
And their wild reverberations
As of thunder in the mountains?


I should answer, I should tell you,
"From the forests and the prairies,
From the great lakes of the Northland,
From the land of the Ojibways,
From the land of the Dacotahs,
From the mountains, moors, and fen-lands
Where the heron, the Shuh-shuh-gah,
Feeds among the reeds and rushes.
I repeat them as I heard them
From the lips of Nawadaha,
The musician, the sweet singer."

He tells how Hiawatha is raised by his grandmother, Nokomis, a star that fell from heaven, to know the animals, birds, and ways of the forest.

Chapter five tells of Hiawatha’s Fasting:
"Not for greater skill in hunting,
Not for greater craft in fishing,
Not for triumphs in the battle,
And renown among the warriors,
But for profit of the people,
For advantage of the nations.”

And of how his prayers are answered by one who gives his life for the people, through a death and resurrection.

We just finished the first half. Hiawatha has wooed and won his beautiful wife, Minnehaha, Laughing Water:"Thus it was they journeyed homeward;
Thus it was that Hiawatha
To the lodge of old Nokomis
Brought the moonlight, starlight, firelight,
Brought the sunshine of his people,
Minnehaha, Laughing Water,
Handsomest of all the women
In the land of the Dacotahs,
In the land of handsome women.”

Just another example of how “anthologies” often do just the opposite of what they intend.  The short excerpt makes us feel like we “know” a work and often inoculates us from the desire to read the entirety, thereby missing the beauty of the whole.

Guest post by my wife.

Longfellow's Hiawatha and Men and Women

Guest post from my Wife:

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, writing in the mid-nineteenth century, seems to have an understanding of the relationship between man and wife, that is severely lacking in our day, despite, or maybe because of, all our obsession with making things “equal between the sexes”.
He begins Chapter 10 of his Epic Poem, Hiawatha, by saying:

"As unto the bow the cord is,
So unto the man is woman;
Though she bends him, she obeys him,
Though she draws him, yet she follows;
Useless each without the other!"

At the end of the chapter, he again sums up the interplay of interdependence of man and woman in the advice given to Hiawatha and Minnehaha, Laughing Water, by the sun and the moon:

From the sky the sun benignant
Looked upon them through the branches,
Saying to them, "O my children,
Love is sunshine, hate is shadow,
Life is checkered shade and sunshine,
Rule by love, O Hiawatha!"


From the sky the moon looked at them,
Filled the lodge with mystic splendors,
Whispered to them, "O my children,
Day is restless, night is quiet,
Man imperious, woman feeble;
Half is mine, although I follow;
Rule by patience, Laughing Water!"


Though we moderns might wince at the word, “feeble”, yet look who is ruling: both, “Rule by love, O Hiawatha . . . Rule by patience, Laughing Water!” A beautiful echo of the words of St. Paul in Ephesians:

“Submit to one another out of reverence for Christ. Husbands, love your wives, just as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her. However, each one of you also must love his wife as he loves himself, and the wife must respect her husband.”

Anthropologist Margaret Mead said, “Every adjustment that minimizes a difference, a vulnerability, in one sex, a differential strength in the other, diminishes the possibility of complementing each other, and leads to a duller vision of human life in which is denied the fullness of humanity that each might have had.” (quoted from Preserve Them, O Lord)

St. Gregory the Theologian said, “In our living together, we are one another’s hands, ears, and feet. Marriage redoubles our strength, rejoices our friends, causes grief to our enemies. A common concern makes trials bearable.”

Oh, that we moderns, with all our “wisdom,” might regain but a small measure of the wisdom of the ancients.

Michael Faraday the great experimentor

Michael Faraday went to work as a janitor in order to be near the scientist Sir Humphry Davy.  From that humble beginning, he would experiment his way to being one of the greatest scientists of his age.  Due to his faith in Christ, he sought no gain from his discoveries and even turned down an appointment as the President of the Royal Society and an offer of a knighthood thinking it not right to accept worldly honors.  He even turned down a government request to develop poison gasses for use in the Crimean War.

An excellent lecturer, Faraday gave a series of talks for boys and girls that became the wonderful book:  The Chemical History of a Candle.  In the lectures, Faraday uses a candle as a bridge to discuss chemicals and their reactions, gasses, the atmosphere, gravity, and so much more.  He said "there is not a law under which any part of this universe is governed which does not  come into play and is touched upon in these phenomena.  There is no better, there is no more natural philosophy than by considering the physical phenomena of a candle."

The lectures demonstrate his great skills at experimentation and scientific reasoning that are very easy to grasp.  A true model of the scientific endeavor and a worthy classic to be studied by students of science.

        

Of Stories and Essays

”Bree said, ’And now, Tarkheena, tell us your story. And don’t hurry it – I’m feeling comfortable now.’

”Aravis immediately began, sitting quite still and using a rather different tone and style from her usual one. For in Calormen, story-telling (whether the stories are true or made up) is a thing you’re taught, just as English boys and girls are taught essay writing. The difference is that people want to hear the stories, whereas I never heard of anyone who wanted to read the essays.”

– C.S. Lewis, The Horse and His Boy

The True Order of Knowledge

"It is better to be a simpleton and to approach God with love than to be a know-it-all and, at the same time, be an enemy of God." These are the words of the priest-martyr, St. Iraneaus of Lyon. The truth of these words have been confirmed at all times and is also confirmed in our time. One thing must be added to this, namely, that the lovers of God are not simpletons because they know God well enough that they are able to love Him. Of all human knowledge, this knowledge is more important and greater. To this must be added that the enemies of God cannot be more knowledgeable, even though they consider themselves as such, because their knowledge is unavoidably chaotic, for it does not have a source and does not have order. For the source and order of all knowledge is God. Some of the saints, such as Paul the Simple, did not know how to read or write yet with the strength of their spirit and divine love surpassed the entire world. Whosoever approaches God with love, that person is not capable of crime. Knowledge without love toward God is motivated by the spirit of criminality and war. St. Euthymius the Great taught: "Have love; for what salt is to food, love is to every virtue." Every virtue is tasteless and cold if it is not seasoned and warmed by divine love.

(source:  The Prologue from Ohrid, April 2)