As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases
I entered the Roman Catholic Church a little more than 20 years ago now, and my experiences in non-sectarian, public-charter classical education, first as a teacher, and then for a decade as a school leader, were a necessary condition for it. The soil of my soul was tilled by Socrates. To Tertullian’s exasperated question What does Athens have to do with Jerusalem? I say: everything, bro. Everything.
There was also the influence of my wife and her family; the birth of my first daughter; my own Catholic-leaning (though officially ecumenical) Christian secondary education; basically the entirety of the Ignatius Press catalogue up to that point; a mildly-mystical experience of watching one of the red banners hanging from the church ceiling at Pentecost swaying in an air current that mysteriously affected only it and not the others; my first experiences singing Gregorian chant and attending the old Latin Mass; the pathos of having watched earlier that year live on broadcast television the final days and death of Pope John Paul II, the spectacle of a papal requiem Mass, that magnificent funeral homily by Cardinal Ratzinger, his zinger of a pre-conclave homily (the “dictatorship of relativism” one), and the thrill of seeing him step out on to the balcony as Benedict XVI on what just happened to be my son’s 3rd birthday.1
But prior to that, going deep into the practice and then the theory of Paideia-movement liberal education did so much to cure me of my prolonged and sophomoric Nietzschean delusions about the amor fati and the death of God.
After a few years of teaching the great books to high school students in a public, non-religious charter school, I wanted to know more about what I was doing and began exploring the works of Mortimer Adler. His How to Read a Book was to my soul what Cicero’s now-lost Hortensius was to the young and cocksure Augustine of Hippo in his student days: “it exhorted the reader to study philosophy…all my empty dreams suddenly lost their charm and my heart began to throb with a bewildering passion for the wisdom of eternal truth. I began to climb out of the depths to which I had sunk, in order to return to you.”2
The progression went something like this:
Teaching the great books Socratically is very satisfying, thrilling, even. I’m learning, and the kids are learning. This thing is real.
In HtRaB, Adler describes deep reading—dialectical, syntopical—in a way that fits with my experiences of reading and teaching the great books.
The reasons he gives for why it works and is fruitful are simply incompatible with nihilism. There is truth, and reason can access it.
Hmmm.
This extended experience with Adler—especially the collected essays in Reforming Education and then both volumes of his autobiography3—was, in the context of my teaching career, the turning point. But if I go a few years farther back in my teaching career, I can pinpoint an even earlier moment at which something began to stir in my mind. It was at a faculty meeting at the public charter school where I was teaching at the time, and the assembled teachers were studying Flannery O’Connor’s essay on “The Nature and Aim of Fiction”, the central insight of which is this:
(It) is from the kind of world the writer creates, from the kind of character and detail he invests it with, that a reader can find the intellectual meaning of a book. Once this is found, however, it cannot be drained off and used as a substitute for the book...a piece of fiction must be a self-contained dramatic unit. This means it must carry its meaning inside it. It means that any abstractly expressed compassion or piety in a piece of fiction is only a statement added to it. It means that you can’t make an inadequate dramatic action complete by putting a statement of meaning on the end of it or in the middle of it or at the beginning of it. It means that when you write fiction you are speaking with character and action, not about character and action.4
It was as if a shattered vase at once became unshattered and violently reassembled itself into a whole in an instant. Yes! This is what great literature does! This is why I can’t stand stupid moralizing or allegorizing interpretations of novels and poems. And this seems like a good description for the meaning to be found in all art, and even in nature itself: it doesn’t contain a message; it is the message. The fact that O’Connor was a Catholic was not unknown to me, and I began to wonder if her Catholicism might have something to do with her soundly integral view of meaning and message, of the inseparability of form and content in art, an integralism very different from the dualistic, abstracting Evangelical-Protestant way of thinking about art, a tendency to demand propositional statements of truth from objects of aesthetic contemplation and to prefer the preachy and didactic to more complex and less overtly demonstrative representations of reality.
There were other tendencies I had experienced in the culture of low-church Protestantism that I had a vague notion of being akin to this erroneous way of interpreting literature: the view that grace was a kind of external magic that seized hold of the recipient without response or participation; that the essence of the human was the immaterial soul and the body a disposable container; that the Bible was a book without any human context or literary qualities, and that any statement could be extracted from any place in it, isolated, and interpreted as applicable, however tenuous, to anything that the ardent believer wished to argue. I had a vague notion that all these opinions were somehow akin, and that they all represented the essence of Christianity; whatever the refutation of this great bundle of abstracting and spiritualizing and anti-realist errors was what I was sure I believed in.
But here in Flannery O’Connor I encountered a Christian writer who described the truth about art and its interpretation in a way that made my soul-strings ring out. How could this be? I thought all Christians were proof-texters, moralizers, and despisers of the real. But here is one who not only doesn’t denigrate reality by seeking meaning external to it, she sees reality as being supercharged with meaning inseparable from it.
I had found a teacher in her. And she was a Catholic Christian. Hmmm.
What I didn’t know at the time was that here, in a public-school faculty discussion about the teaching of fiction, without the name of God being invoked once, the Catholic truth of grace supplements nature was beginning to assert itself over the heretical principle of grace destroys nature. It was doing so here by analogy rather than directly, and it took years for it to completely unfold, but this is where it began. In a non-sectarian, public classical charter school. My road to Rome and from it, deo volente, to the Heavenly Jerusalem, began in pagan Athens.
Throughout my career I have never ceased to encounter serious Catholics—usually cradlers rather than converts—who denigrate the project of public classical education. “Oh, so you aren’t allowed to talk about God at all, right?” “So that’s basically a Catholic school where everything that’s TRUE is taken out of it.” “You work at that school where you read that one ancient book called the Bible that has no particular value and is just one text among many? (followed by self-satisfied ‘Beavis and Butthead’-style snickering.)”
To such resentful elder brothers in the faith past and future, I say: judge a tree by its fruits. I’m far from the only one.
Andrew Ellison has been a leader in the classical liberal education movement since 1997, having served as a high school teacher, headmaster, and charter school administrator for 26 years in two states before moving into higher education. He is a Senior Writer for Cana Academy and posts regularly about classical education and other topics on LinkedIn. Ellison is currently Vice President of Enrollment Management at the University of Dallas. He writes from Irving, Texas.
His renunciation of the Chair of Peter became effective on what was my 37th birthday. I packed down so much carrot cake with cream cheese frosting and vanilla ice cream that night, but it just wouldn’t ease the pain. Worst. Birthday. Ever.
Confessions III.4
Learning he had converted to Christianity near the end of his life was quite the kick in the behind.
pp. 75-6 from the FSG collection Mystery and Manners.