"Hundreds of people can talk for one who can think,
thousands can think for one who can see." - John Ruskin
Hans Christian Anderson’s fairytale The Snow Queen begins with the story of a demon that creates a
looking-glass with the power to make everything good or beautiful “shrink to
nothing, while everything that was worthless and bad looking increased in size
and [became] worse than ever. The most lovely landscapes appeared like boiled
spinach, and the people became hideous…” The demon kept a school to show
mankind what the world was really like and he carried the looking-glass
everywhere so that the people in every land could look through the distorting
mirror. Eventually in his pride the demon even tried to fly the mirror up into
heaven to see the angels, but it slips from his hand and breaks into tiny
fragments which rain down on mankind. These tiny fragments can lodge in
people’s eyes and even their hearts so that they can see nothing either rightly
or justly. The rest of the fairy tale concerns the fate of one boy who has a
mirror fragment lodged in his eye and heart.
It is a commonplace in our world that “beauty is in the eye
of the beholder”, meaning that what is beautiful is completely relative and up
to the individual to decide. This is not the understanding of the best of the
ancients or the great teachers of Christ’s Church. The classical and Christian
tradition has understood beauty as an objective reality that comes from God
himself who is indeed the source of all beauty. But sin has entered in and
distorted our sight and in some cases completely inverted the true order of the
world. In The Brothers Karamazov, Fyodor
Dostoyevsky has one of his characters say that we have fallen so far that “what
to the mind is shameful is beauty and nothing else to the heart. Is there
beauty in Sodom? Believe me, that for the immense mass of mankind beauty is
found in Sodom. Did you know that secret? The awful thing is that beauty is
mysterious as well as terrible. God and the devil are fighting and the
battlefield is the heart of man.” If beauty is objective and our vision is
distorted preventing us from seeing, then what is needed to purify our eyes and
restore our vision? As philosopher Mark Anderson says, beauty is not in the eye
of the beholder, rather “beauty is in the eye of the beautiful.” Or as the
Apostle Paul puts it “be not conformed to this world. But be transformed by the
renewing of your mind…” Our souls must be rightly ordered and renewed; they
must become beautiful in order for us to see what is beautiful. Now to be sure,
this is the work of the grace of God, yet we also need practice, or dare I say,
classical Christian education to assist us in seeing aright.
The task of education according to David Hicks is to
cultivate virtuous human beings: “Virtue is the life that knows and reveres,
speculates and acts upon the Good, that loves and reproduces the Beautiful, and
that pursues excellence and moderation in all things.” That is why we read great children’s stories:
to beautify our imaginations. That is why we study logic, mathematics, and
science: to beautify our minds. That is why we read and discuss classic
literature and history: to beautify our souls. That is why we study the
scriptures and the theology of the Christian church: to beautify our
hearts. In the words of the great fourth
century theologian Gregory of Nazianzus, we need to “polish our theological
self to beauty like a statue” so that we can see what is truly beautiful.
What happened to the young boy with the distorted glass shards
in Hans Christian Anderson’s The Snow
Queen? You’ll have to read it yourself to see the great lengths that had to
be pursued, but ultimately it was removed by the love of another who would not
rest, who would suffer any hardship, who would sacrifice all for the restoration
of the young boy’s true heart and sight. And ultimately that is what we have in
Christ and what we must do and be as parents and teachers to teach ourselves,
our children, and our students to be able to see what is good and true and
beautiful. This is why we pursue classical Christian education.
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