These study questions are part of the study over Josef Pieper’s Only The Lover Sings. For a general introduction to this study you can go HERE. If you’d like to learn more about Study The Great Books or to find another text to study, you can go HERE to learn more.

Virtues/Vices/Great Ideas: (Find these in the Text and Note them in the Margins)

Appearance vs. Reality, Art, Fantasy

Grammar Questions: (The Information of the Text)

1. In this final essay, what did Josef Pieper “wish to express as best” as he was able?

2. Despite the obvious physical exertion that accompanies the work of sculpting, what did Pieper say is always the “beginning” of any real work of art?

3. What was it that “unanimously the great thinkers of the Western tradition have extolled?”

4. How did Anaxagoras respond to the question “Why are you here on earth?”

5. What does “to contemplate” mean and not mean according to Pieper?

6. What did Eugene Ionesco call “those ‘objects’ that regularly dominate certain art exhibitions?”

7. What must the “true artist” be “endowed” with?

8. What does “art flowing from contemplation” attempt to capture?

9. What alone opens up “a new dimension of ‘seeing’” for the artist?

10. Of what notion did Pieper say “nothing would be more alien to our sculptor friend?”

11. What is the case about those “in the fine arts who all too hastily have ‘seen enough?”

Logic Questions: (Interpreting, Comparing/Contrasting, Reasoning)

1. What did Pieper mean when he said “the distinguishing and characterizing element in … artistic creativity” is the “contemplative life?”

2. Why might so many of “the great thinkers of the Western tradition have extolled” an “attitude of receptive observation?” What is meant by “receptive observation?”

3. What was Pieper trying to do when he contrasted the work of his “sculptor friend” with much that day’s contemporary art work by saying “you will not encounter anything not truly resulting from seeing; none of it is born of mere thinking or reasoning, much less is it arbitrarily contrived?”

4. What might it mean to call certain art exhibitions “museums of despair?”

5. Pieper wrote “Art flowing from contemplation does not so much attempt to copy reality as rather to capture the archetypes of all that is.” What did he mean by that?

6. What was Pieper trying to say about the kind of art that is “neither-nor?”

7. What did Pieper mean when he said “the eyes see better when guided by love?” How does love help an artist to see as they ought?

8. What does “loving acceptance” and “affectionate affirmation” have to do with creating art that is contrary to works which “revile, despise, and distort reality?”

9. Why might Pieper have praised his “sculptor friend” not only for not despising or destroying reality but also for not creating a “false idealization” of reality as if “all reality were wholesome and without rough edges?”

10. What distinction was Pieper making about the two ways a person “can’t see enough” of something?

11. What does it mean to say “Contemplation will not be satisfied until blinded by the object of its ultimate desires?”

Rhetoric Questions: (The Analysis of Ideas in the Text)

1. Affirm or deny (and then contend vigorously for your position) the following statement: Only that which comes as a result of a receptive contemplation of reality deserves to be called art, anything else is pseudo-art.

2. Does real art demand a certain level of skill or is it more dependent upon the heart and attitude behind it? Put another way, might something which took great technical skill to produce be less worthy of the term “art” than that which was made by a seven year old who drew a picture after looking at a beautiful sunset? How simple or complex ought we to make the standards of what counts as true art? Further, how might we distinguish not only between real and false art, but also between good and bad art?

Theological Analysis: (Sola Scriptura)

1. Read Philippians 4:8. How might we connect this command from the apostle Paul to the calling of a true artist?

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These study questions are part of the study over Josef Pieper’s Only The Lover Sings. For a general introduction to this study you can go HERE. If you’d like to learn more about Study The Great Books or to find another text to study, you can go HERE to learn more.

Virtues/Vices/Great Ideas: (Find these in the Text and Note them in the Margins)

Art, Celebration

Grammar Questions: (The Information of the Text)

1. What was Hölderlin’s “harsh question” that he posed in his poem “Bread and Wine?”

2. To what other arts did Pieper think this question spoke to besides “only the poet or poetry?”

3. What does “barren times” mean, more specifically, according to Pieper?

4. According to Pieper, what does it mean to “celebrate a feast?”

5. What notion of Jean Paul Sarte must we reject if we ever want to celebrate a birthday?

6. What is the “intricate connection between fine arts and festival?”

7. Who did Plato say are “guests at every festival?”

8. Of what did Pieper say “such a thing simply cannot even be conceived?”

9. What two realities does the word “paradise” equally indicate?

Logic Questions: (Interpreting, Comparing/Contrasting, Reasoning)

1. What was Hölderlin trying to say when he asked “What good are poets in barren times?”

2. Why did Pieper think that the question “what good are poets in barren times?” really extends to all the arts?

3. Why must “the reality of our life and our world be first wholeheartedly accepted” in order for us to be able to celebrate a feast?

4. What does it mean for this acceptance to “be expressed and lived out in exceptional rituals?”

5. Why might Jean Paul Sarte’s statement “that it is absurd to be born and exist” be in opposition to the celebration of not only birthdays, but festivity in general?

6. What is meant by the statement “love alone knows how to sing?”

7. Why do the Muses and festival go hand-in-hand together?

8. What did Pieper mean when he said “the festive character of any feast” involves “the remembrance of primordial bliss and the anticipation of future fulfillment?”

9. What does it mean to say “All that exists carries somehow the imprint of ‘paradise’, and all authentic fine arts, offspring of the Muses, know how to make this truth apparent?”

Rhetoric Questions: (The Analysis of Ideas in the Text)

1. A major idea in Josef Pieper’s work in general (as well as in this present essay) is the necessity to become in tune with and accept reality as it is, the world as it is, and our place in it. How can we make sure we are accepting of reality and our place in the world? What does it look like to celebrate our existence as human persons and how does this relate to the various fine arts and to feasts and festivals? How might having a right view of God help us to have a right view of the world, our neighbors, and ourselves and to celebrate as we ought?

Theological Analysis: (Sola Scriptura)

1. Read Exodus 15:1-21. What connection do we see in this text between festivity and the Muses?

   Study the Great Books is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

These study questions are part of the study over Josef Pieper’s Only The Lover Sings. For a general introduction to this study you can go HERE. If you’d like to learn more about Study The Great Books or to find another text to study, you can go HERE to learn more.

Virtues/Vices/Great Ideas: (Find these in the Text and Note them in the Margins)

Myth, Art, Memory

Grammar Questions: (The Information of the Text)

1. According to Pieper, with what idea do all of the Muses have some “inner connection?”

2. According to Pindar’s account about the Muses, for what “task” were they created?

3. Pieper said that instead of thinking of the Muses “as beings who ‘remember,’” we should rather think of them as having what purpose?

4. What did Pieper say was an essential quality of the thing “one remembers” which is not “here and now?”

5. Though, as Christians, “we do not see the Muses as some sort of divine beings” what should we see them as according to Pieper?

6. To what other role did Pieper liken the artist’s position in society?

7. What are some dangers to which the artist is constantly exposed?

8. What “Far Eastern proverb” did Pieper share?

Logic Questions: (Interpreting, Comparing/Contrasting, Reasoning)

1. Why would “rememberance” be associated with the nine Muses?

2. If Pindar is correct and the Muses’ task is “to sing the praises of all creation” what should this infer about what is proper and improper in the artistic endeavor (be it drawing, painting, sculpting, writing poetry, music, etc.)?

3. What distinction is there between “to remember” and “to remind” and how are each of these related to the concept of creating art?

4. Pieper said that those who remember as well as those who are “helped to remember, though not perceiving things totally alien to him, nevertheless beholds a ‘different’ reality, ‘distinct’ from his daily and direct experience.” Why might it be beneficial to be reminded of things which are outside of our daily and direct experience?

5. After denying that we should think of the Muses as “some sort of divine beings” Pieper said we should “understand them as a real yet empirically and psychologically elusive potency that brings about inspiration.” What did he mean by that?

6. Speaking of the inspiration of the Muses and the “different” reality they call to remembrance, Pieper said this reality “can in no way be something accidental and inconsequential. It will rather be something that all too readily is ignored and ‘lost’ – precisely because it is ‘different’ – yet must not be forgotten if our existence is to remain truly human.” What was he trying to say here?

7. Pieper wrote “Here we somehow sense the artist’s inner relationship to the priest…” In what way are the artist and the priest similar in their respective roles?

8. What did Pieper mean by saying the artist “is by nature exposed to countless possibilities of losing direction and aim” and also “in danger of deceiving himself or…deceiving others?”

9. When Pieper spoke of the artist’s temptation once he has “acquired and mastered the ‘creative’ possibilities of his craft – to produce an opus decidedly ‘different’ from the accustomed and everyday experience of reality, yet in essence false, and in its banality a mere ruse.” What did he mean by this?

10. What does the proverb “Those who only look at themselves do ever radiate nothing” mean?

11. When Pieper praised the statue “Young Woman Reclining” by saying “it prompts those beholding it to recall their own remembrance of the primordial archetypes veiled in this same reality” what did he mean by that?

Rhetoric Questions: (The Analysis of Ideas in the Text)

1. Pieper contrasted the art “created with uncommon skill yet entirely without substance, thriving only on the surprise it elicits by being outrageously novel and therefore unable to radiate any deeper meaning” versus the “artist who, in contrast, seeks nothing for himself, who rather keeps the recesses of his soul in silence and simplicity, receptive to the breath of creative inspiration.” In light of this, and other things said in this short essay, what is true art versus false art? Why might mere “novelty” tend to get more popular praise than some pieces which are more deserving of the name “art?” How can we learn to better appreciate good art and despise that which is not worthy of the name?

Theological Analysis: (Sola Scriptura)

1. Read Exodus 25. What can we learn about the value and purpose of art from this passage of Scripture? How can we relate it back to what we have read in Pieper’s essay?

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This post is part of a series in which I am comparing Study The Great Books’ History and Literature curriculum and our curriculum philosophy against other well known classical Christian curriculum publishers. To see a comparison between STGB and Memoria Press, click here.

When I first started teaching history and literature in a classical Christian school, more than a decade ago now, I was handed the Veritas Press Omnibus II textbook and a large stack of books with it (the following books, as a matter of fact):

As you peruse that book list you will find that every single one of them is a genuinely Great Book and well worth your time. As I taught this class over the next four years I came to know and love these books very well. The Omnibus Press book list is an excellent list of Great Books! If you find yourself in need of book recommendations you couldn’t do much better than looking through the Table of Contents of Omnibus volumes I-VI because they have curated an amazing list of books to read and they all deserve your time. I found, as I was thrown into the deep-end with Omnibus, that I was learning all kinds of wonderful things and being delighted constantly with great stories. If you go the VP Omnibus route you will be up to your elbows in books worth reading!

Different schools have approached VP’s Omnibus program in different ways. You’ll notice that the above Table of Contents from Omnibus II is divided into “Primary” and “Secondary” texts. The school where I then taught was committed to doing the whole of Omnibus. It divided it into two class periods for each grade and attempted to get through all of the books each year. In the case of Omnibus II, that was 27 Great Books (of varied size) in one school year. The total number of Great Books to be read in Omnibus I-VI (grades 7th-12th) totals to about 120. Of course some schools (or homeschooling families) have chosen to pick and choose and do less (this is pretty typical, from what I have observed).

Again, the school where I worked went for it and tried to do them all. I think “tried” is honestly the right word here. The teachers, like myself, were sincere in their effort. Nevertheless, I know from my own personal experience and from conversations with other Omnibus teachers that most of the teachers couldn’t really get through all of the books they were trying to teach, in any kind of thorough fashion, until they had been teaching the class for several years in a row. Most teachers were, of course, teaching multiple other classes too (I was teaching two distinct classes in logic, half of Omnibus VI, and an introductory Latin course while teaching all of Omnibus II my first year). It was simply more than I could really keep up with to read these books, along with all my other responsibilities, thoroughly and keep ahead of my students. I’m not a fast reader, I admit, but I found I was not alone in this situation.

The situation with the students was…well, worse. The fact of the matter was this, the vast majority of students found themselves unable to keep up with the pace, many stopped even trying, and the handful who really did it (the one’s I actually believed when they said “I read it all”) were often to be heard saying things like “I hate reading now. I don’t ever want to read another book again when I graduate.” Not exactly what any teacher and lover of the Great Books wants to hear coming from the mouths of his students. Even so, I understood why they felt that way.

Those who use Omnibus and choose to pair it back a good amount are right to do so. The philosophy that demands one do the entire Omnibus reading list (Primary and Secondary) each year is akin to the philosophy that says it’s more delightful to drink from a firehose than a waterfountain. It’s just too much. The defenders of this approach have, I think, a couple of reasons for their insistence.

For one, they think that these are the years we have these students and can direct their reading and hold them accountable to it and if we don’t make them read these books now they will never read them at all.

For two, they tend to argue that width is its own kind of depth and that in order to get a true Great Books education one needs to read many books from all across the spectrum of time and genre and in order to accomplish this, we simply have to get through all of these books.

In response to the first defense of doing the whole of Omnibus each year I would simply say that this approach simply doesn’t achieve what it aims at for most students because they simply cannot or will not get through all of the books. Further this approach almost universally creates an animosity towards reading among the students whose faces we are shoving into the blast of the firehose. Trying to make students read too many books just creates a situation of failure, frustration, and loathing. I would also say that the conclusion “if we don’t make them read these books now they will never read them at all” is simply a non sequitur. It is not necessarily true that if they don’t read these books now then they will never read them at all. I’ll come back to that point in a bit.

In response to the second defense of doing the whole of Omnibus each year I would acknowledge the justice of the concern that a true Great Books education is a widely read kind of education. It is important to read across the ages and genres of Great Books and there is a kind of depth that comes from width, but I say (again) it simply doesn’t work to drown children in Great Books. The nobility of the desire to give children a comprehensive Great Books education through inundation simply doesn’t produce the desired result.

One of the things I think it is most important for us to understand and believe is this: Our education (and our students’) is never finished. You can never deliver a truly “complete” education. You can only deliver the complete tools of learning, equipping them to learn whatever else they might like to. After you’ve given them the tools of learning your best bet is to shape their loves. If a student learns how to learn whatever they love, and if you teach them what they ought to love, then you have given them a path to the good life which does not end at high school (or even college) graduation.

It is an utter mistake to beat or drown the love of learning and reading out of our students by insisting that they must, hell or high water, get through all of this in 6 years. It will not achieve what you desire in the vast majority of cases and, in fact, typically achieves a position which is diametrically opposed to what you hope to achieve.

The Study The Great Books curriculum intentionally reads fewer books, taking more time to enjoy what we do get to. The 8th grade program STGB is putting together has a total of 17 text across our History & Literature courses (which parallels Omnibus II).

History Semester 1:

1. ESV Journaling Bible: (Purchase Book)

   1. Luke (Online) (PDF)

   2. Acts (Online) (PDF)

2. Didache (Online) (PDF)

3. The Eruption of Vesuvius, by Pliny the Younger (Online) (PDF)

4. Agricola, by Tacitus (Online) (PDF) (Purchase Book)

5. Germania, by Tacitus (Online) (PDF) (Purchase Book)

History Semester 2:

1. Eusebius’ Church History, Translated by Paul Maier (Online) (PDF) (Purchase Book)

2. On The Incarnation by Athanasius (Online) (PDF) (Purchase Book)

3. The Ecumenical Creeds of Christendom (PDF) (Online)

4. The Rule of St. Benedict (Online) (PDF) (Purchase Book)

Literature Semester 1:

1. Eagle of the Ninth by Rosemary Sutcliff (Online) (PDF) (Purchase Book)

2. Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, translated by Tolkien (Online) (PDF) (Purchase Book)

3. Song of Roland (Online) (PDF) (Purchase Book)

4. The Dragon and the Raven by G. A. Henty (Online) (PDF) (Purchase Book)

Literature Semester 2:

1. Myths of the Norsemen by Roger Lancelyn Green (Purchase Book)

2. Beowulf, translated by Seamus Heaney (Online) (PDF) (Purchase Book)

3. Macbeth by Shakespeare (Online) (PDF) (Purchase Book) (Print Study Guide)

4. Winning His Spurs by G. A. Henty (Online) (PDF) (Purchase Book)

As you can see, we are getting close to having the 8th grade material completed! Our approach, which still provides students with many excellent Great Books to study, is nevertheless more achievable without reaching despair. In my own classroom we typically follow the flow of reading together in class one day (annotating the books thoroughly) and discussing questions over the book the next. Using that pattern we successfully get through the material each year while having read the majority of the books together in class (sending some excess pages home here and there). This pace and approach results in a high degree of confidence that the students are actually reading the books and it provides a pace that is challenging but not overwhelming. We go slow enough to actually think about and discuss the texts more thoroughly which results in greater comprehension and enjoyment. Having used this approach in my own classroom for years now I know, for fact, that the kids tend to really enjoy what they are reading a lot more this way and they actually say things like “You mean this person wrote other books? I’d love to read that too! Can we read it next?”

Love of reading the Great Books is a result, more often than not, of actually understanding what they are reading. The full Omnibus approach is simply not conducive to students reading books thoroughly and understanding them and therefore tends to create bitterness rather than joy and excitement.

Okay, enough about the volume of books read, let’s compare the way in which Omnibus and STGB interact with the books they are reading. Again, I acknowledge that many schools have already concluded that to do the whole Omnibus reading list is just too much. So what of those who read half (or so) of the books on the Omnibus list and still use the Omnibus text? How does the Omnibus approach compare to STGB’s study guides?

The first difference to note is the introductions to each book. Omnibus’ introductions are admittedly much more comprehensive that what STGB chooses to provide (which is intentional). Undoubtedly Omnibus’ introductions are often full of good information, however we advocate the position that it is better to teach students to mine that same information out of the book where possible. Some historical context can be nice, of course, but Omnibus has the bad habit of giving away much of what can be found in the book itself before you ever read the book (this is particularly painful when it comes to fiction books wherein the Omnibus introduction tends to give away the whole plot and key points). We have opted to give minimal introductions which are typically more like thematic essays to whet your appetite rather than discuss many details of the book students are about to read. We also don’t want to pre-color a student’s interpretation before they ever open it.

What about the lessons themselves? Let’s take a look at the first few lessons in Veritas Press’ Omnibus II over Eusebius’ Church History:

Omnibus opts to have students answer questions over their introduction for the first lesson (or Session as they like to call it). All of those questions are simple apprehension questions (what we would call Grammar Questions). STGB does not assign a lesson for our introductions.

For Session II in Omnibus we see the assigned reading is Book 1.1-1.13 of Eusebius (27 pages of reading). Compare this to the STGB’s opening reading assignment in Eusebius, Book 1.1-1.4 (10 pages of reading). Omnibus reads all of Book I in one lesson, we read it in three. So, again, grueling pace or manageable pace?

Let’s consider the format of their lesson. Session II in Omnibus asks 12 questions across three categories (plus a Summa Question which may be used as an essay prompt).

Their first category is “Text Analysis” questions which are basic comprehension questions about the text and roughly equivalent with our Grammar Questions category.

Their Second Category is “Cultural Analysis” questions. Let’s pull those out and look at them. For the first reading in Eusebius they asked:

1. What do most people think about Christ?

2. Do all Christians today agree with Eusebius’s statement that Abraham and his forebears should be called Christians?

3. How does our culture define Christian?

The purpose of these questions is, as best as I can articulate it, meant to make students think about the Christian perspective of an issue in contrast to “the world” or “secular culture.” Now, I advocate thinking Christianly in all things and I acknowledge that Christians who are thinking biblically will typically see things differently than their non-Christian neighbors, but I don’t like this category of questions for several reasons.

First, I don’t like Omnibus’ “Cultural Analysis” questions because I think they frame reading the Great Books in light of the “culture war” and, it seems to me, it intentionally tries to develop an antithesis between Christians and their neighbors rather than looking for ways to build bridges to the world through cultural apologetics.

Second, I think the “Cultural Analysis” questions ask things which are often difficult to answer in a meaningful way. Consider #1 above…how do I know what “most people think about Christ?” Do most people share a uniform opinion? Doubtful. Consider #2 above… “do all Christians agree...”, well stop right there because if you are asking about any issue that is not of creedal level importance then it doesn’t matter what comes next. No. The answer is no. Christians do not all agree. Consider #3…”How does our culture define Christian?” What does that mean? Which culture? Western Civilization? American Culture? The Bible Belt? It’s so vague. Further, I don’t want to speak for other people, I want to speak for myself.

To be honest, I have talked with a lot of teachers over the years who have done Omnibus and I think there is a fairly wide consensus of not liking Omnibus’ “Cultural Analysis” questions.

The Third Category of Omnibus’ questions is “Biblical Analysis” and these are much like out “Theological Analysis” questions. They tend to be pretty decent. When I was teaching Omnibus I stopped using their Cultural Analysis questions and tended to just use their Text Analysis and Biblical Analysis questions and left it at that.

Now, notice, there are 12 total questions across those three categories for a reading assignment of 27 pages. Let’s compare this against the STGB opening lesson for Eusebius Book 1.1-1.4:

Grammar Questions: (The Information of the Text)

1. Eusebius gave eight purposes he intended to achieve in writing his church history. Name three of them.

2. Where did Eusebius say that anyone writing a history of the church must start?

3. Eusebius said Christ’s character was “two fold”. What analogies did he use to represent this?

4. What did Eusebius hope to demonstrate to those who claimed that the Christian faith was “recent and foreign, appearing only yesterday”?

5. What would “reason never permit” according to Eusebius?

6. What are three occasions whereupon Eusebius argued the divine Son of God manifested himself in human form prior to his incarnation?

7. Why, according to the text, was Christ not “proclaimed long ago to all people and all nations, as now”?

8. What happened, according to Eusebius, once the law of the Hebrews “became famous and penetrated everywhere”?

9. Give an example of how Eusebius says the names “Jesus” and “Christ” are used in the Old Testament Scriptures?

10. Eusebius gives three reasons why Jesus Christ is greater than the former men who bore the name or title of Jesus and Christ in the Old Testament. What are those reasons?

11. According to Eusebius “the recent proclamation of Christ’s teaching” was clearly what?

Logic Questions: (Interpreting, Comparing/Contrasting, Reasoning)

1. Why did Eusebius say “this project requires kindness on the part of the reader”? What did he mean by that?

2. What did Eusebius mean by saying that our receiving the name “Christian” is a “dispensation more divine than most realize”?

3. Why was it important to Eusebius to demonstrate the “antiquity and divine character of Christianity”?

4. What did Eusebius mean by saying that Old Testament saints like Moses and Abraham recognized Christ “through the eyes of the mind”?

5. Why could the “theophanies” not be anyone else but Jesus Christ?

6. Why was it that “in the past humanity was not capable of grasping the teaching of Christ in all its wisdom and virtue” whereas now we can?

7. Why would God have purposed to use the names of Jesus and Christ for other people throughout biblical history before Jesus of Nazareth?

8. Why is it fitting that Jesus is said to be in the line of Melchizedek?

9. How did Eusebius prove that Christianity “is not new or strange but, in all honesty, ancient, unique, and true”?

Rhetoric Questions: (The Analysis of Ideas in the Text)

1. Eusebius said, “All of these credited for righteousness, going back from Abraham to the first man, could be described as Christians in fact if not in name, without exceeding the truth.” Do you agree with Eusebius that it would be appropriate to refer to Old Testament believers as Christians? Why or why not? Explain your answer carefully.

2. Eusebius seems intent on proving that Christianity is ancient and not new and that it is consistent with what has always been believed from the beginning (all the way back to Abraham and beyond). How important is it for the Christian religion to be unchanging? Why should it not change with the times? Explain your answer thoroughly and carefully.

Theological Analysis: (Sola Scriptura)

1. Read Genesis 18. In what ways does it become clear that one of the “men” who appeared to Abraham is not only more than a mere man but also more than a mere angel?

2. Read Romans 4. How does this passage compliment Eusebius’ claim that Christianity is consistent with the ancient faith of Abraham?

Again, note that our “Grammar Questions” are relatively equal to Omnibus’ “Text Analysis” questions and our “Theological Analysis” is fairly parallel to their “Biblical Analysis” questions. That leaves our “Logic Questions” and “Rhetoric Questions” against their “Cultural Analysis.”

Our Logic Questions variously ask students to wrestle with the interpretation of the text (they also sometimes have them compare one part of the text with other parts or to infer possibilities from given information).

Our Rhetoric Questions ask students to give their own position on an idea or subject matter within the text and to do so with reason and persuasiveness. We might sometimes touch on issues in this category that Omnibus would ask about in their “Cultural Analysis,” but we always ask students to articulate their thoughts in a reasoned way as opposed to trying to explain what someone else, or some ambiguous notion of culture might say.

STGB uses the Trivium to move through the text from Grammar (Comprehension) to Logic (text based Interpretation, analysis, and inference) to Rhetoric (reasoned articulation of one’s own thoughts). We finish with Theological Analysis because God’s word always gets the final say over the ideas presented in a text and over our own thoughts about them.

Obviously, given that these 24 questions (shown above) are over 10 pages of reading for our first lesson as opposed to 12 questions over 27 pages of reading, STGB has a lot more questions available to make use of with students. We think our questions are superior in format and quality as well as number, but it is not, by any means, necessary (or advisable) to assign all questions for every reading. If you want some ideas about how to use STGB study guides effectively without overwhelming anyone GO HERE.

One thing that STGB has in our curriculum which is also absent from Veritas Press’ Omnibus is vocabulary, character, geography, and event lists with descriptions. Our guides are designed to be companions to the text so that students understand the vocabulary and various kinds of references made within the reading. Our Eusebius Study Guide is still in Beta, meaning we are working on filling in those details, but the vast majority of our guides are already complete in this way and Eusebius will be, Lord willing, in the near future.

For reference:

Like I said, most of our PDF study guides (and all of our finished study guides at www.studythegreatbooks.com) have those categories completely filled in, but we are still working on bringing this guide to 100% completion.

Note also our list of Virtues, Vices, and Great Ideas which clue in students to be on the lookout for examples of those in the present reading so that they can find excellent Commonplace entries for their Commonplace Books!

Veritas Press’ Omnibus Program has these excellent qualities:

1. Omnibus is a complete program whereas STGB is still under development.

2. Omnibus has an incredibly good and comprehensive book list.

3. Omnibus’ textbooks are aesthetically pleasing and have lots of extra details about art, history, poetry, architecture, etc.

Veritas Press’ Omnibus Program has these drawbacks in comparison to STGB

1. Omnibus tries to have students read too much and tends to make reading Great Books less enjoyable and causes students (and sometimes teachers) to be frustrated and give up.

2. Omnibus tends to give away too much of the book in their introductions and to color the students’ opinions before even opening the book.

3. Omnibus’ categories for questions are not as comprehensive as STGB’s and the “Cultural Analysis” is often too vague and combative.

4. Omnibus doesn’t allow time, nor provide enough material, to really thoroughly think through the ideas of a given text well.

5. Omnibus doesn’t offer students helps like lists of defined vocabulary, and descriptions of people, places, events, nor does it put students on the lookout for examples of the Great Ideas, Virtues, and Vices.

I am grateful for Veritas Press’ Omnibus program and its good qualities which have been a help to me and many others over the years. Veritas Press is a great curriculum house with many good things worth your time. I don’t wish to leave anyone the impression that I think ill of them or their materials. Simply put, STGB is standing on their shoulders as we seek to make the next generation of classical Christian curriculum that will go even further and continue to benefit the body of Christ.

These study questions are part of the study over Josef Pieper’s Only The Lover Sings. For a general introduction to this study you can go HERE. If you’d like to learn more about Study The Great Books or to find another text to study, you can go HERE to learn more.

Virtues/Vices/Great Ideas: (Find these in the Text and Note them in the Margins)

Happiness, Music, Law, Fantasy, Goodness, Virtue

Grammar Questions: (The Information of the Text)

1. According to Pieper, what do “Philosophers, especially those interested also in the practical things of culture and education, like to reflect” upon?

2. What is “one question particularly intriguing to the searching mind of the philosopher” when he thinks about music?

3. According to Pieper, how does music differ from “the fine arts or poetry?”

4. How did Pieper describe the state of man’s being or existence?

5. According to Pieper, and the entire “tradition of Western wisdom,” what is man seeking after relentlessly?

6. Pieper said Music does not only express “jubilation,” but also what other ideas or emotions?

7. According to Plato, what does music “imitate?”

8. What is the “prime matter” of music according to Pieper?

9. Which two thinkers acknowledged and tried to counteract the “distinct possibility of corruption…ever present where music is made?”

10. According to Plato, for what purpose is music a “tool?”

11. According to Pieper, what is there an “intimate relationship between?”

12. What are two kinds of banal music according to Pieper?

13. Whose music did Pieper particularly praise?

14. According to C. S. Lewis, what are two things which “cannot be found in hell?”

Logic Questions: (Interpreting, Comparing/Contrasting, Reasoning)

1. Why might “the essence of music” be of particular interest to philosophers?

2. In view of what Pieper has said, what makes music importantly distinct as an art from arts like drawing, painting, and sculpting or even from poetry and prose?

3. What did Schopenhauer mean by saying music “does not speak of things but tells of weal and woe?”

4. Pieper said “man is intrinsically a pilgrim.” What did he mean by that?

5. What did Pieper mean when he said “Even when man pursues evil, he intends a perceived good?”

6. What did Kierkegaard mean by saying “that music in relation to the spoken word is both the leader and the follower, coming both first and last?”

7. What does it mean to say “music is similar to ethics and related to it?”

8. What is meant by saying “music articulates the inner dynamism of man’s existential self?”

9. What is the significance of music not being “some impersonal, abstract energy” but rather a thing which is “‘performed’ by musicians with all their distinctive individualities?”

10. When Pieper wrote of the possibility of their being a kind of “music of nihilism” what was he trying to say?

11. Pieper tells us “since music articulates the immediacy of man’s basic existential dynamism in an immediate way, the listener as well [as the composer or performer] is addressed and challenged on that profound level where man’s self realization takes place. In this existential depth of the listener, far below the level of expressible judgments, there echoes - in identical immediacy - the same vibrations articulated in the audible music.” What is he saying here? What warning is he giving to the listener of music?

12. In what way might music be used “to form man’s character” and also “for the right ordering of society’s legal structure?” What could Plato have meant by that?

13. Pieper said there is an “intimate relationship between the music made and listened to in a society on one hand, and the inner existential condition of such a society on the other.” What did he mean by this?

14. What does it mean to compare “the history of Western music” to the “history of a soul’s degeneration?

15. What did Lewis mean by saying music and silence “are two things which…cannot be found in hell?”

16. How are music and silence compatible despite being seemingly opposed to one another?

Rhetoric Questions: (The Analysis of Ideas in the Text)

1. Pieper wrote, “Subconsciously, and apart from any specific act of the will but also in the innermost core of all our conscious exercises of the will, we yearn for perfect happiness. In this lies man’s fulfillment, man’s good, the beckoning aim and destiny of his unfolding existence.” Would you agree or disagree with Pieper that man directs all of his actions toward achieving happiness? Give some reasons why some might argue this is not so. Give some reasons why others would say this is so. What, ultimately, do you think and why?

2. In The Republic Plato said “they really look on music as if it were a mere amusement and think no harm can come from it.” Is music ever mere entertainment or is it always morally charged in some way? How important is it to listen to the right kind of music? How might music either positively or negatively affect things such as our thoughts, attitudes, vocabulary, and even our soul? Are certain kinds of music rightly called, as Aristotle put it, “music for slaves?” Why or why not?

Theological Analysis: (Sola Scriptura)

1. Read through 1 Samuel 10:1-8; 1 Samuel 16:14-23; 2 Kings 3:9-20; and Daniel 3. What are the various uses we see music playing in these passages of Scripture? What should we take away from these various passages about the importance and use of music?

2. The biblical book of Psalms is a divinely inspired book of song. What does the inclusion of such a book in sacred Scripture tell us about God’s own thoughts about the value of music?

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These study questions are part of the study over Josef Pieper’s Only The Lover Sings. For a general introduction to this study you can go HERE. If you’d like to learn more about Study The Great Books or to find another text to study, you can go HERE to learn more.

Virtues/Vices/Great Ideas: (Find these in the Text and Note them in the Margins)

Temperance, Appearance vs. Reality

Grammar Questions: (The Information of the Text)

1. What fact will those who concern themselves with culture and education experience “again and again?”

2. What was the setting and occasion from which Pieper wrote this brief essay?

3. In Pieper’s conversations with fellow passengers, what are some things which he noticed that others did not notice?

4. According to Pieper, why does “the average person of our time” lose their ability to see?

5. What is the first thing which “The restoration of man’s inner eyes” depends upon according to Pieper?

6. What, according to Pieper, “constitutes the essence of man as a spiritual being?”

7. What kind of man “inevitably falls prey to the demagogical spells of any powers that be?”

8. What did Pieper say is “a better and more immediately effective remedy” to curing man’s ability to see than mere abstention from the “visual noise” of the day?

9. What did Pieper say “The mere attempt…to create an artistic form compels the artist” to do?

Logic Questions: (Interpreting, Comparing/Contrasting, Reasoning)

1. What does it mean to have “the spiritual capacity to perceive the visible reality as it truly is?”

2. Why might Pieper have found it remarkable that his fellow passengers had not noticed many of the various things he mentioned?

3. When Pieper said “There does exist something like ‘visual noise,’ which just like the acoustical counterpart, makes clear perception impossible” what did he mean by that?

4. Why might one assume that “TV watchers, tabloid readers, and movie goers exercise and sharpen their eyes” in the process?

5. What did Pieper mean when he wrote “The ancient sages knew exactly why they called the ‘concupiscence of the eyes’ a ‘destroyer’?”

6. Pieper wrote, “there exists a limit below which human nature itself is threatened, and the very integrity of human existence is directly endangered.” In the context it was said, what did he mean by this?

7. Why might the “impoverished” man be susceptible to falling prey to “the demagogical spells of any power that be?”

8. Why might participating in artistic creation be a powerful way of helping man regain his powers of sight (in the inner-eye sense)?

Rhetoric Questions: (The Analysis of Ideas in the Text)

1. Since the time Josef Pieper first wrote of the problem of there being “too much to see” which creates a “visual noise” that desensitizes us to being able to see what matters, reality itself, things have clearly only become more chaotic and not less. How do we navigate the modern world of constant media (often in our pockets everywhere we go) so that we don’t become blind to what is real? What do you think of the advice given in this essay for curing this ill, is it still good and practicable advice for our own time? Are there any other suggestions you might make as to how we can be in tune with reality as God made it and shut out the noise?

Theological Analysis: (Sola Scriptura)

1. Read Matthew 6:22-23 and Proverbs 21:4. How might we relate these passages of Scripture to what Josef Pieper has said in this essay?

2. Read 1 John 2:15-17. Connect what the apostle is saying here to Pieper’s essay.

   Study the Great Books is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

These study questions are part of the study over Josef Pieper’s Only The Lover Sings. For a general introduction to this study you can go HERE. If you’d like to learn more about Study The Great Books or to find another text to study, you can go HERE to learn more.

Virtues/Vices/Great Ideas: (Find these in the Text and Note them in the Margins)

Work, Leisure, Beauty, Meaning, Freedom vs. Bondage

Grammar Questions: (The Information of the Text)

1. What did Josef Pieper tell us “work” is and does?

2. According to Pieper, what “other notion” besides “spare time” comes to mind when we think of times where we are not working?

3. What has “changed considerably since the time of antiquity and the Middle Ages?”

4. What did Pieper say is the “historical consequence” of “a total and final disintegration of the concept of ‘leisure?’”

5. What did Pieper say is “the essential characteristic of work?”

6. According to Pieper, what is it that “traditional wisdom has always understood?”

7. What did Pieper say would be “a fiction to declare?”

8. According to Plato, when does a man’s life become “fully worth living?”

9. According to Pieper, how do we know when “there is an activity that is meaningful in itself taking place?”

10. Pieper listed at least four ways of “reaching out in contemplation to the root and foundation of all that is.” What were those four ways?

11. What are the two conditions which Pieper said are “intimately tied…to the activity that is meaningful in itself?”

12. What is it that “artistic activity especially” tends to become without the aforementioned two conditions in place?

Logic Questions: (Interpreting, Comparing/Contrasting, Reasoning)

1. When Pieper said the three concepts of work, spare time, and leisure “hide a deeply challenging problem” what did he mean? What is the problem?

2. How does the concept of “a holiday” or “a feast day” introduce a distinction to the bare concept of “spare time?”

3. Pieper said “the way we see the human person and therefore the meaning of our existence has…changed considerably since the time of antiquity and the middle ages.” What might he have in mind as far as how our view of the human person has changed over time? What kind of things might account for this shift?

4. What did Pieper mean when he said “We must understand that a total and final disintegration of the concept of ‘leisure’…will have a clear historical consequence; namely, the totalitarian work state?”

5. How is “leisure” supposed to be different from “loafing” (lazily not doing much)?

6. What does it mean for “an activity” to be “meaningful in itself?” How is this different from work being meaningful?

7. What distinction is Pieper making between the “servile arts” (artes serviles) and the “liberal arts” (artes liberales)?

8. Why did Pieper think the assertion that “the production of useful things” is “meaningful in itself….leads to the exact opposite of what it seems to accomplish?”

9. Pieper wrote: “The ultimate fulfillment, the absolutely meaningful activity, the most perfect expression of being alive, the deepest satisfaction, and the fullest achievement of human existence must needs happen in an instance of beholding, namely in contemplating awareness of the world’s ultimate and intrinsic foundations.” What did he mean by this?

10. What do “religious meditation,” “philosophical reflection,” and “the creation of the artist” all have in common which makes them all means of beholding “the very essence of reality?”

11. Why did Pieper think “an attitude of receptive openness and attentive silence” and “the ability to celebrate a feast” are preconditions to engaging in activity which is “meaningful in itself?”

12. Pieper wrote, “all forms of ‘liberal’ activities, above all in the area of the arts, are essentially of a festive nature as long as they contain at least some remote echo of that fundamental attitude of acceptance.” What did he mean by this?

13. Why might Pieper have argued that apart from festive contemplation “artistic activity especially” has the tendency to “degenerate …into idle and empty game playing or into some novel and sophisticated form of busy-ness, profiteering, and nervous distraction – if it does not simply sink to the level of crass entertainment?”

14. Pieper wrote, “Wherever the arts are nourished through the festive contemplation of universal realities and their sustaining reasons, there in truth something like a liberation occurs: the stepping-out into the open under an endless sky, not only for the creative artist himself but for the beholder as well, even the most humble. Such liberation, such foreshadowing of the ultimate and perfect fulfillment, is necessary for man, almost more necessary than his daily bread, which is indeed indispensable and yet insufficient.” In your own words, what point was Piper making here?

Rhetoric Questions: (The Analysis of Ideas in the Text)

1. This reading ends with the refrain, “We work so we can have leisure.” What difference is there between this statement and the one which says “We have leisure so that we can be more productive at work?” What does each statement, in turn, seem to imply about the nature and purpose of man? As we think about finding fulfillment in life, how do the concepts of work, spare time, and leisure each play into that sense of fulfillment respectively? What may happen if too much of ourselves is given to any one of these categories?

Theological Analysis: (Sola Scriptura)

1. Read Psalm 46 and connect it to what Josef Pieper has said in this essay about art and contemplation.

2. Read Matthew 4:4 and Matthew 6:11 and relate them back to what Pieper was saying about the arts.

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A PDF version of this study with lots of extras is available to Paid Subscribers!

Josef Pieper is, for my money, one of the greatest philosophers of the twentieth century. His ability to treat grand matters with simplicity and brevity is one thing that sets him apart amongst a class of intellectuals that tend to struggle equally with both. Too many philosophers have struggled with their own egos, loving their own thoughts more than the thing which they are supposed to be thinking about. Many others, even among those who are more sincere in their quest for understanding, nevertheless fail to communicate in a way that is accessible and succinct. Pieper, on the other hand, always comes across as a true lover of wisdom who is more fond of the subject of his inquiry than his own thoughts on the matter. Sometimes his words are full of piercing clarity, sometimes they have a kind of depth which feels as thick as blood, but never is any of it extraneous or flashy or meant as mere flourish. Piepers’ philosophy exudes humility.

This humility can be seen clearly in the following quote:

Pieper is not a gatekeeper, not an ivory tower intellectual who lords himself over the plebes, the common or lowly of society, rather he joyfully invites every man, woman, and child to wonder alongside him about all of the things which have always tugged at the hearts of those who were willing to simply take the time to stop, look, listen, and contemplate in submission to reality.

Indeed this submission to the real is a constant theme in the works of Josef Pieper. He writes “whenever and wherever we thus behold the very essence of reality — there is an activity that is meaningful in itself taking place.” Further, he writes, “An activity which is meaningful in itself…cannot be accomplished except with an attitude of receptive openness and attentive silence.” Pieper’s understanding of the role of the philosopher is that he or she must be intentionally receptive, quieting the self so that one can perceive the echoes of eternity in the world that God has made. Only by subjecting the self to reality can the self ever reach the great heights of truth, goodness, and beauty.

This little book you are about to read contains five short essays by Josef Pieper wherein he reflects Christianly upon the visual and musical arts. The opening essay, from which I have already quoted, touches briefly upon the same ground as his longer work, Leisure, the Basis of Culture. In this brief essay he asks us to consider whether man is made for work or if work is meant to provide man with something else, something other than work. Pieper encourages us to wonder whether that other thing might not be the real thing, the thing which touches what it really means to be human.

What if the work week, the time of utility and production of goods is not the whole point? What if we do not merely rest from work so that we might return to work with more energy? Likewise, what if mere rest, the cessation of work (what some might call “quitting time,” “holiday,” or “vacation”) is not the thing for which we should be living? What if we were called to feast, to celebrate, to make things which are good in themselves and not for some other use?

This is, in fact, what real art is. Art is not for something else. Art is a reflexive expression which comes from sincere contemplation. Art expresses the artist’s impressions of reality. The more that expression mirrors reality, as it is, the more pure the art. The artist displays or performs his art so as to invite the beholder to join in the contemplation. The true artist leads the beholder to experience with him the truths he has mined from reality by humbling himself before the real. The true artist makes himself a conduit of reality. The false artist, contrariwise, puts only himself on the canvas or in his song, obscuring and obfuscating reality for the beholder through the promotion of only his own ego. The false artist is a wall, but the true artist is a window through which others may behold reality.

If you want to begin thinking about the arts philosophically, you have picked up the right little book. Josef Pieper is, himself, a true artist and through him I believe we will be able to see more about art than we ever have before.

Lesson 1: “Work, Spare Time, and Leisure”

Lesson 2: “Learning How To See Again”

Lesson 3: “Thoughts About Music” and “Music and Silence”

Lesson 4: “Remembrance: Mother of the Muses”

Lesson 5: “Those ‘Guests at the Festival’”

Lesson 6: “Vita Contemplativa — The Contemplative Life”

These study questions are part of the study over Plato’s Meno. For a general introduction to this study you can go HERE. If you’d like to learn more about Study The Great Books or to find another text to study, you can go HERE to learn more.

Virtues/Vices/Great Ideas: (Find these in the Text and Note them in the Margins)

Being or Needing a Guide, Knowledge

Grammar Questions: (The Information of the Text)

1. According to Meno, are the gentlemen from his region agreed on whether virtue can be taught?

2. What did Meno say that he never heard Gorgias “promising” and at what thing did he say Gorgias “only laugh at?”

3. According to Socrates, “if there are no teachers” of what else did Socrates say we can reasonably conclude that there are none?

4. According to Socrates, “good men are necessarily” at least one of what two possibilities?

5. What did Socrates think they had gotten wrong in their earlier supposal about what is required in order to be a good guide?

6. What “illustration” did Socrates give to highlight the difference between “right opinion” and “knowledge” and why the latter is preferable.

7. What is one thing which Socrates definitely professes to know despite his general reluctance to admit he knows much of anything?

8. What did Socrates set aside as a candidate “to be our guide in political life?”

9. According to Socrates, how does virtue come to the virtuous?

10. What task did Socrates leave to Meno to take care of at the end of this dialogue?

Logic Questions: (Interpreting, Comparing/Contrasting, Reasoning)

1. Why was Anytus upset by Socrates’ means of demonstrating that virtue cannot be taught?

2. Why might Gorgias have laughed at those who promised to teach virtue to others?

3. What was Socrates hoping to demonstrate by sharing three quotes from the writings of Theognis?

4. Socrates said that Theognis’ statements contradict one another. Is there a way to understand these quotes which does not imply contradiction? If so, how? If not, why not?

5. Why did Socrates say “I am afraid…that Gorgias has been as poor an educator of you as Prodicus has been of me?”

6. What distinction was Socrates making between “true opinion” and “knowledge?”

7. Why did Socrates think that “true opinion” was an equally good guide for men as is “knowledge?”

8. Why did Socrate make the illustration about “the images of Daedealus?”

9. Why might Socrates have been so emphatic in his affirmation “that knowledge differs from true opinion” even though both will serve equally well as a guide for men?

10. Why did Socrates compare “true opinion” in politics with “divination…in religion?” How are they similar?

11. What did Socrates mean by saying that we may “truly call those men ‘divine’ who, having no understanding, yet succeed in many a grand deed and word?”

12. At the end of this dialogue Socrates declared that “virtue comes to the virtuous by the gift of God.” What did he mean by that?

Rhetoric Questions: (The Analysis of Ideas in the Text)

1. Consider Socrates’ statement that “good men are necessarily useful or profitable.” Do you agree or disagree with this claim? Is it impossible to be a good man without being either of these things? Explain your answer carefully.

2. Throughout this dialogue we have considered whether virtue is granted to some people by nature, whether it can be taught, and now whether it is simply a gift from God apart from being a kind of knowledge (a divine gift to certain men). Having thought through all of these possibilities, where do you stand now as it relates to how a man may become virtuous? Do you agree with the conclusions drawn that it is not a product of nature or teaching or would you still defend either of those (or some combination)? Do you think there is merit to the idea that virtue is a divine gift? Why or why not? Is there any angle or aspect of how a person might pursue virtue that we have not considered? What might you add (or even want to ask) about this topic?

Theological Analysis: (Sola Scriptura)

1. Read Mark 10:17-31 and relate it to the question of virtue in Plato’s Meno.

2. Read Philippians 3:1-11 and relate it to the question of virtue in Plato’s Meno.

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It was a real pleasure to catch up with Joffre this morning! I am super excited about his new curriculum Word Hoard: The Rhetoric of Poetry and I plan to implement it for our seniors at Caritas Academy (once we have seniors in two years). You can find Joffre’s material and the rest of Roman Roads Press’ Wordcraft curriculum by clicking HERE.

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These study questions are part of the study over Plato’s Meno. For a general introduction to this study you can go HERE. If you’d like to learn more about Study The Great Books or to find another text to study, you can go HERE to learn more.

Virtues/Vices/Great Ideas: (Find these in the Text and Note them in the Margins)

Virtue, Courage, Prudence

Grammar Questions: (The Information of the Text)

1. What direction did Meno desire the conversation take at this point?

2. What did Socrates propose they should do if Meno would be willing to “condescend a little” in his request?

3. What was the “first hypothesis” that Socrates proposed for their inquiry?

4. After making “a quick end” of this first question, what was “the next question” which Meno and Socrates pursued?

5. According to the text, when are things like “health and strength” and “beauty and wealth” profitable or hurtful to a person?

6. According to Socrates, “If virtue is profitable” what sort of thing must it be?

7. If men were “by nature good” what did Socrates say a society would surely do with such people?

8. If men are “not by nature good” then what else is left to explain the existence of good men (given the current supposition)?

9. According to Socrates, which profession claims to teach virtue “at a fixed price?”

10. What did Socrates say would be the result if a “mender of old shoes, or patcher up of clothes” made shoes and clothes worse rather than better?

11. According to Anytus, who should be qualified to answer Meno’s question about “how to become eminent in the virtues?”

12. According to Socrates, what would Themistocles “have desired to” do concerning his son if at all possible?

13. What did Anytus say Socrates was “too ready” to do and what advice did Anytus give him?

Logic Questions: (Interpreting, Comparing/Contrasting, Reasoning)

1. Why might Socrates have preferred to determine what virtue is first before inquiring as to whether “virtue is given by instruction or not?” Also, why might he have decided to allow the change of direction in their conversation?

2. Why might Socrates have wanted the question of “‘whether virtue is given by instruction, or in any other way,’ to be argued upon hypothesis?” What does it mean to inquire by hypothesis?

3. Socrates hypothesized “that virtue is or is not knowledge.” If virtue is knowledge, what are some implications of this? If virtue is not knowledge, what else might it be?

4. What does it mean to say that “virtue is profitable?”

5. Socrates said things like “health and strength, and beauty and wealth” are only profitable when they are rightly used. What did he mean by this? How might someone misuse these seemingly good things?

6. When Socrates said “courage wanting prudence…is only a sort of confidence” what did he mean by that?

7. When Socrates said “if virtue is profitable, virtue must be a sort of wisdom or prudence” what did he mean by that?

8. Why did Socrates say that if “virtue is either wholly or partly wisdom” then “the good are not by nature good?” What did he mean by that?

9. Socrates concluded “on the supposition that virtue is knowledge, there can be no doubt that virtue is taught,” but he then doubts this supposition, saying it may be “erroneous.” Why did he doubt this original supposition was correct?

10. Why might Socrates have thought that Anytus would be an ideal helper in pursuing the questions as to whether or not virtue can be taught? Also, do you think he was sincere in saying that Anytus was an ideal helper? Why or why not?

11. What was Socrates’ purpose in comparing the Sophists (like Protagoras) to menders of “old shoes” or patchers up “of old clothes?” Was he trying to defend the Sophists against Anytus’ charge that they are corruptors of young men or not? Why do you think so?

12. Why might Anytus have despised the Sophists even though he insisted that he has no acquaintance with them nor any “wish to be acquainted?”

13. What might we infer about Anytus by his claim that “any Athenian gentleman, taken at random” should be able to teach Meno about virtue and how to acquire it?

14. Anytus assumed that these good Athenian gentlemen “learned of the previous generation of gentlemen” how to be virtuous. How did Socrates demonstrate this to be evidently false?

15. Do you think Anytus’ last words to Socrates were a threat? Why or why not?

Rhetoric Questions: (The Analysis of Ideas in the Text)

1. Socrates seems to agree with Anytus that the Sophists are not able to teach virtue and that young men are not wise to give them their money and time, but he nevertheless chastises Anytus who admitted to being “entirely unacquainted with them” having never spoken or interacted with them. Socrates asked Anytus “how can you know whether a thing is good or bad of which you are wholly ignorant?” In light of this, do you think we should always seek to gain personal knowledge of a person or group of people before we criticize them or is it sometimes appropriate to criticize another person or group though we have never talked to them or sought to understand them personally? Why might it be best to get to know someone or some perspective before we criticize it? What might be the danger in giving our time to people or ideas we have been warned by others will not be profitable? How do we navigate the tension between not wanting to be ignorantly critical but also not get drawn into worldly foolishness? Explain your thoughts carefully.

Theological Analysis: (Sola Scriptura)

1. Read Proverbs 2:1-15. How might this relate to our discussion about virtue and how it is gained?

2. Read Ephesians 2:1-10. What does this passage seem to imply men need if they are really to walk in virtue (which Socrates said always profits us)?

3. Read 1 Samuel 8:1-9. How does this relate to our present reading in Meno?

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Our summer giveaways are in full swing and we have drawn our first winner! Congratulations to (one of our free subscribers who beat the odds over those paid subscriber entries) for winning the first round of our drawings. He will be receiving the STGB Annoation Edition of The Didache as well as our Study Guide for that wonderful little book. Also Nole is getting one of our Commonplace Books so he can start collecting all the wisdom of the written word! Congratulations again Nole!

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From now until the end of July we are offering 15% off of our Paid Subscriptions here on Substack! Normally $5 a month or $50 dollars a year (already an incredible deal) when you become a paid subscriber between now and July 31 you can lock in your subscription for life at just $4.25 a month or $42.50 a year! You’ll gain access to our ever growing library of PDF Great Books study guides (more than 50 guides for books from the ancient, medieval, and modern world…Gilgamesh, Plato, Aristotle, Luke and Act, Athanasius, Boethius, Shakespeare, etc., etc.) as well as other curriculum pieces like our Progymnasmata Primer (Classical Writing Exercises) and access to live online book clubs and other exclusive online events.

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For less than $5 a month you can gain access to the Humanities curriculum we are building long before it makes it to our finalized print editions! Whether you are just interested in learning yourself, or you are homeschooling your kids, or you are a teacher in a classical Christian school, or maybe you are leading a book club in your church or community, we have the resources to help you! All for less than the price of a single Starbucks coffee once a month.

Your support keeps the work going and it also makes it possible for us to provide help to those who need it. We will always help homeschooling families undergoing financial strain (we’ve been there, we get it) or start-up schools with next to no budget. If you need out help, if you cannot afford our material, all you have to do is ask. But for those who are able to support this work with a monthly paid subscription, we thank you with all our hearts.

At STGB we believe classical Chrsitian education may be the single greatest force for good in our nation. Giving young people and adult men and women a Liberal-Arts education that is Christ-centered has the power to change the course of our nation and the world. We want everyone who wants to give or get this kind of education to have it (whether they can afford it or not).

Get 15% off forever

Thank you for all of your continued support by following, liking, and sharing materials from Study The Great Books with your friends and connections! Let’s keep working together to make the world better together as we seek the face of Christ and pursue truth, goodness, and beauty through classical Christian education!

Yours in Christ,

Jacob Allee, Ph.D.

Founder and Lead Curriculum Developer

In this series I plan to compare and contrast the History and Literature curricula of some of the other well-known classical Christian curriculum companies (particularly their 7-12 grade materials) against the Study The Great Books approach. At a later date I may do a similar analysis of the competing Logic and Rhetoric curricula available, but since STGB is still a few years from entering that fray in earnest with our own publications we will stick to Literature and History materials for now. I mean for these posts to highlight our attempt to be competitive alongside other excellent companies, but I am not seeking to be combative. It is a principle of the Free Market that competition breeds excellence and, at STGB, we are working hard to produce a superior product and we welcome the competition. May we all continue to outdo one another as we seek to equip the body of Christ with the finest educational materials possible.

For this first post I want to compare STGB’s approach to History and Literature with Memoria Press’.

On a personal note, Memoria Press was the primary curriculum that my wife and I used when we homeschooled our four children during the early years of their education. It’s great material and far more affordable than some other programs. I still regularly promote Memoria Press to homeschooling families, especially those with children in K-6. Martin Cothran, the editor of Memoria Press’ Classical Teacher magazine, author of various parts of their curriculum, and provost of Memoria College (which is a super cool program) is someone I highly respect and enjoy talking to each summer at the Repairing the Ruins conference. All-in-all, Memoria Press is a great curriculum house and we honor them and their contribution to the great work of restoring education in America.

Memoria Press’ approach to History and Literature is broken up differently than we do it at STGB. They divy up their study of History and Literature books into categories like Classical Studies, Christian Studies, and Literature and Poetry whereas we prefer to have blurrier lines between subjects and emphasize to students that all areas of learning flow in and out of one another. That point is one which I would assume that Memoria Press agrees with, by the way, but we are organizing our material in such a way as to intentionally promote the unity of all learning as opposed to separate subjects.

Another point of differentiation between STGB and Memoria seems to be that Memoria’s approach to reading Literature by grade does not strictly follow a temporal progression. For instance, if you were to order their pre-packaged 9th grade curriculum you would be getting The Aeneid, Beowulf, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and The Hound of the Baskervilles among other pieces of literature. All excellent pieces, but nevertheless a scatter-shot across the ancient, medieval, and modern time periods. STGB, on the other hand, follows a progression like so:

Logic Grades 7th-9th

7th grade History and Literature covering the time span from Creation of the world to the Incarnation of Christ.

8th grade History and Literature covering the time span from the Incarnation of Christ to the Reformation of the church.

9th grade History and Literature covering the time span from the Reformation of the church to present day.

Rhetoric Grades 10th-12th

10th grade

Humane Letters A: Round two of History and Literature covering the time span from Creation to Incarnation of Christ.

and

Syntopical Seminar A: A year long seminar studying the seven virtues through great literature.

11th grade

Humane Letters B: Round two of History and Literature covering the time span from the Incarnation of Christ to the Reformation of the church.

and

Syntopical Seminar B: One quarter studying the Arts, one quarter studying Education, and one whole semester on society and politics all through reading Great Books.

12th grade

Human Letters C: Round two of History and Literature covering the time span from the Reformation of the church to present day.

Syntopical Seminar C: A year long literary seminar on Faith and Reason.

Our final curriculum plan is still a bit malleable at present while it is still under construction, but you can get the gist of where we are going with it by looking HERE.

We believe that this intentional progression will help students form in their mind a better sense of the flow of history, the interconnectedness of all knowledge and learning, and it will help drive the studies of that year towards a clear objective. We also do not divide biblical and Christian history from history in general and we spend a lot of time in the Christian Scriptures and early church documents as a central part of the student’s moral, theological, philosophical, and historical education.

Though we are still in the midst of building our curriculum, in the long term STGB plans to sell both complete packages of our curriculum, by year and course, as well as giving families, schools, and individuals the option to purchase curriculum pieces and study guides separately so they can pick and choose as they like. We are simply putting together a robust plan to follow for those who are looking for such guidance and we think we have a great plan in the works!

Let’s get in the weeds a bit and look at a sample from Memoria Press’ Literature curriculum alongside one of our guides. The following is a sample lesson from Memoria Press’ Anna Karenina student study guide.***

Now let’s take a look at an STGB Study Guide. The following is from our Sir Gawain and the Green Knight study guide.

A few things stand out in comparison between STGB and Memoria study guides. For one, Memoria likes to ask a “Pre-Grammar” question, which is to say a “Pre-reading” question. This gives students something to be thinking of before they begin their reading. I like that, honestly, it’s a cool feature of their approach. Another feature of Memoria Press’ guides is that they provide some “reading notes” which are basically definitions for terms or other helpful tidbits to help the student understand difficult or unfamiliar things in the text. They then ask the student to figure our the correct definition of some words or terms based upon context. This latter part is a good skill, I respect this move as well, but STGB has preferred to simply define all vocabulary which we think is either critical to understanding the text or which is likely to be unfamiliar to the student. We think helping the student to quickly understand what they are reading is key to their enjoyment of these Great Books and the love of reading Great Books is a major goal of our curriculum. Struggle is important, but we prefer for that struggle energy to be applied primarily to wrestling with the ideas of a text rather than the vocabulary. Again, simply a choice we have made that we find has been helpful in our experience.

Conspicuously absent in Memoria Press’ guides, by comparison to our own, is the lack of information about Characters or Historical People, Places or Geography, and Events mentioned in the text. We have tried to give the student everything he needs to understand the text so he is not lost and can quickly gain informational context and enjoy what he is reading. We also think this often leads to rabbit trails of interest that may lead the student to begin exploring on their own (often connecting them to other Great Books).

Another detail present in the STGB Study Guides, which is not in the Memoria Press guides, is a list of Great Ideas, Virtues, and Vices which can be found in the reading. We encourage students to always be on the lookout for these when they are reading, to note them in the margins of their book, and to add them to their Commonplace.

Picking back up with Memoria Press’ approach, once their guide is done with matters of definition they then move on to what they call “comprehension questions.” These are equivalent to STGB’s “Grammar Questions” and they ask, simply, “what is the case” about the text. These are who, what, where, and when type questions (“why” questions too, if the text explicitly explains the “why”). Memoria has chosen to include some page numbers to help students find the answers more quickly, we have opted not to do this. The reason why we don’t do this is because we strongly emphasize the practice of annotating books and we have developed a complete system for students to use. If students annotate faithfully then finding the answers to our Grammar Questions is usually fairly easy.

After the “Comprehension Questions” the Memoria Press guides move on to “Socratic Discussion Questions” which are fairly equivalent to what our guides call “Logic Questions,” which are interpretive in nature. Our study guides ask interpretative questions (“what does the text mean when it says…”), but also we sometimes ask students to compare and contrast what they are currently reading with earlier parts of the text and to infer possibilities in light of the textual information.

Our study guides also have two additional categories of questions which are not found in the Memoria Press guides, namely, Rhetoric Questions and Theological Questions. Our Rhetoric questions ask students to analyze an idea which is found in the text and to express their own thoughts, with reason, about the matter. Theological questions refer the student to a passage in the Christian Scriptures which interacts with similar ideas or themes as found in the present reading assignment of their book and asks them to explain how the Scriptures come to bear on those ideas or themes.

What should be evident, by comparison, is that STGB’s Study Guides are simply more comprehensive in nature that Memoria Press’ guides. We put more information at the fingertips of students and teachers to aid their comprehension and enjoyment of the text. We have provided more questions (and more varied in kind) to help students and teachers explore different and various angles of the reading. Further, our Study Guides are keyed to specifically work with our annotation system and Commonplace system.

Now, one could argue that the STGB guides have too many questions to actually assign to students and this may be true, but it depends. Our guides are designed to work equally well for Homeschooling Families, Classical Christian Schools, Individual Learners, and community Book Clubs (and have been successfully field tested in all of those contexts). The STGB Study Guides should be thought of as Tool Kits which can be used in a lot of different ways (I address this in more depth in another article called A Word to Teachers), but one shouldn’t feel wedded to the concept of assigning every question in every lesson. On the other hand, if I am using a Memoria Press guide with my students then I am far more likely to assign all or most of the questions because they are more sparse.

What else might be said in comparison between STGB and Memoria Press? STGB’s curriculum is completely written by two people working closely together. I am the main curriculum developer and my wife, , is also involved in writing some of our guides. I have a Ph.D. in Humanities from Faulkner University (a Great Books program), she has an M.A. in Philosophy from Clarks Summit University (also a Great Books program). So, in other words, all of our curriculum is written by people with advanced degrees, in a relevant field, who are working closely together to ensure that the curriculum upholds high standards, is consistent in its approach, and is fully integrating with the wider STGB curriculum plan. Memoria Press’ guides are written by a larger number of people. They are great guides, but they do sometimes differ stylistically. I cannot speak to, because I do not know, what the qualifications are of each of the individuals who have written a guide for Memoria Press, I can only guarantee the quality of our own work to be unwaveringly high.

STGB is still working hard to complete our 7th-12th grade History and Literature program and we definitely have a ways to go. Without a doubt, at present, Memoria Press has us beat if what you want is to simply go and purchase a whole packaged curriculum for each grade (and you could do a whole lot worse than going with Memoria Press). Even so, Memoria Press’ offering of study guides for Great Books in the upper grades is not as wide as one might hope and we are quickly catching up to them in our offerings and will soon surpass them in the number of guides we have available (first in our Beta and Pre-Pub PDFs here on Substack and soon in our Print products at www.studythegreatbooks.com). We plan to continue making guides as long as the Lord gives us strength and wisdom to do so, well beyond the basic plan for 7th-12th History and Literature, so we will become the number one place to go for studying the Great Books by offering guides on more books than anyone else in classical Christian circles. This will make it easy for teachers and homeschool parents to either follow our suggested plan wholesale or to trade out certain texts for others they’d like to do, or to develop topical classes of their own, etc.

The last comparison/contrast I wish to offer between Memoria Press and STGB is simply that they are a Roman Catholic publisher and we are squarely in the Reformed tradition.***

I think it’s fair to say that, for the most part, both curriculums largely operate with a kind of “mere Christian” approach. In other words, neither Memoria Press nor STGB are trying to constantly cram their secondary convictions down anyone’s throat. Even so, of necessity, our underlying convictions will rise to the top at times when certain ideas and topics come up in the books we are reading. The way questions are worded may sometimes have certain connotations when, for instance, Sir Gawain is praying to Mary. Obviously Christians who love the Lord feel very strongly and very differently about such an issue and while it is not the habit of either curriculum house to simply tell the student what to believe, we would all be foolish to think that our biases and perspectives do not inform the way we shape our curriculum when it comes to interactions with issues of theological importance.

I lied, one more point of comparison. We have who is hand drawing all of our covers for our Study Guides and Annotation Editions of the books we are publishing. Memoria Press is at a definite loss because they don’t have Joe!

You can pick up copies of the three books Dr Grant told us about here:

1. Orthodoxy, by G. K. Chesterton

2. The Song of Roland, translated by Dorothy Sayers (STGB has Study Guide for this one)

3. The Name of the Rose, by Umberto Eco

Join me for my next live video this coming Monday with where we will be discussing his new “Rhetoric of Poetry” curriculum Word Hoard.

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These study questions are part of the study over Plato’s Meno. For a general introduction to this study you can go HERE. If you’d like to learn more about Study The Great Books or to find another text to study, you can go HERE to learn more.

Virtues/Vices/Great Ideas: (Find these in the Text and Note them in the Margins)

Appearance vs. Reality, Immortality

Grammar Questions: (The Information of the Text)

1. What had Meno been told about Socrates even before he knew him personally?

2. According to Socrates, why does he “perplex others?”

3. What “glorious truth” have certain “priests and priestesses’ as well as “poets” spoken of “by inspiration?”

4. What does “Persephone” supposedly do every “ninth year?”

5. According to Socrates, what is the true nature of “all enquiry and all learning?”

6. By what means did Socrates attempt to prove his thesis about the true nature of all learning?

7. What mistake did Meno’s slave boy make?

8. Did Meno agree with Socrates about the nature of learning by the end of his demonstration?

9. What was the “theme upon which” Socrates was “ready to fight, in word and deed, to the utmost” of his power?

10. To which topic did Socrates return toward the end of this reading?

Logic Questions: (Interpreting, Comparing/Contrasting, Reasoning)

1. Why did Meno playfully accuse Socrates of being “a magician?”

2. What did Meno mean by calling Socrates a torpedo fish?

3. In your own words, explain what Socrates meant by “recollection” as it relates to the matter of enquiry and learning.

4. Why was Meno’s slave boy an ideal candidate for Socrates to attempt to demonstrate his doctrine of recollection?

5. Why might Socrates have chosen to ask the Boy about geometry as opposed to other topics (like history, or art, etc.)?

6. What do you understand to be the error the Boy made while answering Socrates’ questions and why might the Boy have erred in the way that he did?

7. Why might Socrates and Meno have agreed that the Boy was “better off in knowing his ignorance?”

8. Why did Socrates think they should “be of good cheer” in light of the doctrine of recollection?

9. Socrates said “Some things I have said of which I am not altogether confident.” Which things do you think he might be referring to?

10. Why might Socrates think “we shall be better and braver and less helpless if we think that we ought to enquire” as opposed to acting as if it were hopeless to seek after knowledge?

11. Why was this whole excursion into geometry important to the quest for the definition of virtue?

Rhetoric Questions: (The Analysis of Ideas in the Text)

1. Consider the dilemma which Meno implicitly puts upon Socrates, namely, “that a man cannot enquire either about that which he knows, or about that which he does not know; for if he knows, he has no need to enquire; and if not, he cannot; for he does not know the very subject about which he is to enquire.” Socrates, in answer to this dilemma, posits the doctrine of recollection. How else might we try to answer this challenge? In other words, why might a person enquire into something he already knows? Also, how might a person come to acquire new knowledge which he does not already have? To what degree does the acquisition of new knowledge depend upon already having other kinds of knowledge? Do you think human persons come into the world with a certain amount of knowledge already in them (innate knowledge) or are we blank slates (tabula rasa) to begin with and all knowledge is therefore acquired by some process? Explain your thoughts carefully.

2. Socrates told Meno “I am not teaching the boy anything, but only asking him questions.” Do you agree or disagree with Socrates that he was not doing any teaching? Why do you think as you do?

3. What are the pros and cons of giving a student information via lecture versus socratic teaching (guiding students into a topic by asking questions)? Is one always better than the other or does it depend on the situation? If you say one is always better, defend that position with a reasoned argument. If you say it depends, give clear examples as to why one is sometimes preferable to the other depending on the situation.

Theological Analysis: (Sola Scriptura)

1. Read Ecclesiastes 12:7; Isaiah 42:5; and Zechariah 12:1. How might these passages of Scripture interact with the idea of the soul and Socrates’ doctrine of recollection?

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It’s summer time and, as is our wont here at STGB, it’s time to offer an excellent discount on Paid Subscriptions and also to give away some cool stuff!

First thing’s first…

From now until the end of July we are offering 15% off of our Paid Subscriptions here on Substack! Normally $5 a month or $50 dollars a year (already an incredible deal) when you become a paid subscriber between now and July 31 you can lock in your subscription for life at just $4.25 a month or $42.50 a year! You’ll gain access to our ever growin library of PDF Great Books study guides (more than 50 guides spanning over great books from the ancient, medieval, and modern world…and tons more on the way) as well as other curriculum pieces like our Progymnasmata Primer (Classical Writing Exercises) and access to live online book clubs and other exclusive online events.

Here is just some of what people are saying about Study The Great Books:

For less than $5 a month you can gain access to the Humanities curriculum we are building long before it makes it to our finalized print editions! Whether you are just interested in learning yourself, or you are homeschooling your kids, or you are a teacher in a classical Christian school, or maybe you are leading a book club in your church or community, we have the resources to help you! All for less than the price of a single Starbucks coffee once a month.

Your support keeps the work going and it also makes it possible for us to provide help to those who need it. We will always help homeschooling families undergoing financial strain (we’ve been there, we get it) or start-up schools with next to no budget. If you need out help, if you cannot afford our material, all you have to do is ask. But for those who are able to support this work with a monthly paid subscription, we thank you with all our hearts.

At STGB we believe classical Chrsitian education may be the single greatest force for good in our nation. Giving young people and adult men and women a Liberal-Arts education that is Christ-centered has the power to change the course of our nation and the world. We want everyone who wants to give or get this kind of education to have it (whether they can afford it or not).

Get 15% off forever

Now…on to the next bit of fun….

Who doesn’t like free stuff? The only thing better than free stuff is when the stuff is books and book-related paraphernalia! This summer we are going to do four separate drawings for some excellent prizes. Before I tell you what we are giving away, here are the rules for entry:

1. To be eligible to win you must be a current subscriber when you enter and maintain your subscription when your name/account is drawn. You do not have to be a paid subscriber to enter, but note that paid subscribers entries are counted twice which gives them twice as many chances to win!

2. You must “Like” and “Repost” this article (the one you are presently reading) to be entered into the first drawing. After the first drawing is completed there will be another article announcing the beginning of the second giveaway contest and you must like and repost that article as well to be entered into the second drawing. The same process will need to be repeated for the third and fourth drawings.

3. To be eligible to win you must agree to share a photo of yourself with your winnings that we may post on Substack (this helps reinforce the credibility of our drawings).

That’s it! That’s all you have to do! Now…as to the prizes…

For our First Drawing we are giving away a copy of our Annotation Edition of The Didache along with the accompanying Study Guide, as well as one of our most excellent Commonplace Books.

The Didache is one of the oldest Christian writings outside of the New Testament itself and it tells us the difference between the path that leads to life versus the path that leads to death. It is a fascinating look into the early church and an excellent witness to the faith that was “once for all delivered to the saints!”

The STGB Commonplace Book is the first of its kind on the market which provides you with a plan for collecting wisdom from the great literature you are reading and also a means of finding those great quotes again when you want them. It is a tool beyond comparison for readers and writers!

For our Second Drawing we will be giving away a copy of Robert Heinlein’s Starship Troopers along with our Study Guide and a Starship Troopers T-Shirt (unisex, S, M, L, and XL available)!

There may be an inter-galactic bug war going on, but that’s just the background for this incredible story about a young boy becoming a man and all of the things he learned along the way from the men who poured into his life. If you’ve seen the movie…forget the movie. The book is nothing like it and 100 times better.

For our Third Drawing we will be giving away a copy of J.R.R. Tolkien’s translation of the Medieval poem Sir Gawain and The Green Knight along with our Study Guide and a Sir Gawain T-Shirt (unisex, S, M, L, and XL available)!

An Arthurian Legend of the highest order, this alliterative poem tells us of a deadly game that must be played for honor’s sake. It’s tough to not lose your head when playing this game, but maybe Sir Gawain can manage it?

For our Fourth and Final Drawing of the summer we will be giving away a copy of STGB’s Annotation Edition of Bram Stoker’s Dracula along with our Study Guide for the book, a Dracula T-Shirt (unisex, S, M, L, and XL available), and a Commonplace Book!

A story of horror, fortitude, and friendship! Join Jonathan & Mina Harker along with Professor Van Helsing and other friends as they fight to save the very souls of the ones they love and defend the world itself against an insidious evil stalking about the streets of London!

So make sure you are subscribed and stay so, like and repost this article and you are in the first drawing! Look out for the next Giveaway post which will drop on or around May 30th to enter into the Second Drawing! Remember, Paid Subscribers get double entry! Happy Summer reading everyone!

The denigration of the English language, both in writing and in speech, is a matter of great concern to me (and I’m sure this isn’t only a problem in the English language). One of the goals of the Study The Great Books curriculum project is to reinvigorate powerful poetry, prose, and speech through the study of the Great Books and by the creation of a new classical composition and rhetoric program (alongsider our Great Books study guides). Our Progymnasmata Primer is one early representative of what will eventually be a large and robust curriculum for fine tuning students’ use of language in writing and speech, but exercises of this sort are not enough on their own. No exercise or set of exercises will ever infuse into a student the most important quality of a great writer and speaker, namely, love. Loving language itself, as a gift from our Maker who spoke the world into being, is the most important part of excellence in writing and speaking. Generally speaking, love for the language is not burned into a student by rote practice of exercises (even if many other good things are gained in this way), but by experiencing the beauty of language. Reading Great Books, beautiful poetry and prose, powerful stories, and loving them with, and in front of, our children and students is the most powerful thing we can do to help them love what they ought to love.

Written and spoken language is a precious gift and we should respect, honor, and cherish it as the bride and helpmate of our thoughts.

We seem to have, in my estimation, reached an all-time low in American culture when it comes to respecting language. The following are six convictions or practices which I would like to encourage us all toward. I don’t mean to suggest this list is somehow exhaustive as it relates to language-respecting practices, but these are the things which have been bubbling at the top of my mind recently as I think about the topic.

I have written previously on this subject so I won’t spend a lot of time belaboring the point extensively here, but I do want to start with this point. The most important thing we can do with our use of language is respect it as a medium for pursuing and spreading truth. Let he who would use it to other intent be struck dumb! Language, as a gift from God, was made to be a vehicle for communicating truth. When we use it for anything less than truth’s pursuit or conveyance we side with the serpent of old rather than our Maker.

One day “the mouths of liars will be stopped”1 and all deceptions will be laid bare before the judgment seat of God. As the apostle Paul has said, “Let no one deceive you with empty words, for because of these things the wrath of God comes upon the sons of disobedience. Therefore do not become partners with them; for at one time you were darkness, but now you are light in the Lord. Walk as children of light (for the fruit of light is found in all that is good and right and true), and try to discern what is pleasing to the Lord. Take no part in the unfruitful works of darkness, but instead expose them.”2

It is not for no reason that our Savior is called “the Word of God” or that God preserved his councils for us in writing. God loves words of truth. Jesus is the revelation of God, the visible Speech of the Father, incarnate, who came to deliver us from the clutches of the great liar. God loves spoken truth and, indeed, requires it of those who are fully his. He tells us we must “confess with [our] mouth that Jesus is Lord and believe in [our] heart that God raised him from the dead”3 if we wish to be saved. Confession means to acknowledge and speak what is true. It’s what God requires of all people at the gateway of salvation…say it aloud, Jesus is Lord! Stop lying, stop being deceived, say it.

Words matter to God and he demands that those words confess the truth. This is not only confined, however, to matters which men are prone to consider “religious,” but to all matters. The sacred and secular divide is itself a lie. God will not excuse your lying to your spouse or teacher or parent or friend or neighbor simply because you were talking about sports or government or your own past and not something explicitly religious. The Lord owns every square inch of the universe and you are subject to him when at church and when driving to work and when talking with your buddies and when contending with adversaries. In all of those cases, and more, God cares whether you are mimicking him as a promulgator of truth or aping the serpent. Christ is Lord of the spoken and written word and Jesus said “I tell you, on the day of judgment people will give account for every careless word they speak, for by your words you will be justified, and by your words you will be condemned.”4

So the very first thing we can do to respect language is to acknowledge that it is a borrowed thing. It belongs not to us, but to the Word himself. As image bearers we have been given stewardship of language and told to exercise dominion. Language is morally laden, not neutral, and we are responsible to use it in such a way that helps ourselves and others come to a knowledge of the truth. It is a weapon for stabbing serpents and exposing falsehoods and follies. We are responsible to confess reality, to obliterate lies, to write and speak what is true, good, and beautiful, and to glorify the God of language.

If we take this truth seriously and acknowledge the author of Life as the author of all language as well, then we are well on our way to respecting language as we ought. If one cannot be convinced of this point then he will be hard pressed to believe in the value of what else I say below. Some people, without acknowledging the Lord of Language will, of course, have an appreciation of language and its natural beauty and therefore will be willing to pursue the goal of improving their use of language in decorative ways, but they will never pursue it with the will of one who knows that they are under an obligation to their Lord and that they have a God-given calling to use language for kingdom purposes. There are also many snakes who will gleefully dress-up lies to make them more palatable for fools, but let the Christian only offer words “fitly spoken…like apples of gold in a setting of silver”5 consecrated to the Lord of language.

Armed with the conviction that Language belongs to the Lord and that it ought to be used in his service to quest after truth, to spread the truth, and to eviscerate lies, it follows that we ought to become true masters of language as image bearers. Words, spoken or written, are vehicles of eternal ideas. There are many languages in the world and many which have come and gone in the past and, perhaps, there are languages yet to come. All of them have had different words for the same concepts. Whether scribbled in characters like the ones you are now reading, or in pictorial devices, or conical shapes, etc., or whether spoken aloud with various pitches and intonations, words are grasping after changeless concepts.

Our vocabulary is the total collection of words in our arsenal which are available to us as we seek to communicate an idea which we desire to express. It follows that the more words we have in our vocabulary the more likely we are to be able to successfully communicate various ideas. In fact, there is an cyclical relationship between words and ideas. Words are needed to express ideas to others, but words also are useful for forming ideas within us. The more words at our disposal, the more we understand and can help others understand.

Now, in one sense, the English vocabulary has grown considerably over the centuries and continues to grow rapidly with the continual coining of new words. It needs to be said, however, that there is a major difference between speaking about “the English vocabulary” and “the average English speaker’s vocabulary.” In the former case we might say that a comprehensive English dictionary continues to get bigger day-by-day. In the latter case it is very evident that your average individual’s vocabulary range has shrunk drastically in recent years. There is simply less diversity in the average speaker’s and writer’s words than there was in the late 1800’s or even the late 1900’s.

We are losing our language because we have stopped valuing its origin and purpose. If you want to know why this is, then I commend you to read this article. We have become disillusioned with truth and knowledge and we are also entertaining ourselves to death with visual media, from reels to memes, and sliding backward towards illiteracy at an alarming rate.

What can be done about it? For one, we can acknowledge it and care. For two, we can purposefully rebuild our own and others’ vocabulary through intentional effort. If we don’t just roll over and die about the matter then there is no reason we cannot rebuild what has been torn down. It starts with us and we must give it to our children as well. One of the best ways to build our vocabulary is to read old and great books. We need to retrieve the English vocabulary that was in use by the great English authors of the eighteenth, nineteenth, and early twentieth centuries. We need to read excellent English poetry and prose and eschew modern drivel. I do not say that there are no good modern English writers, but they are few and far between. Obviously I am a writer (I am writing now) and I have great respect for many of my peers today, so I don’t mean to overstress this point or suggest we ought not to read anything contemporary, but I merely parrot C. S. Lewis in telling you that we ought to read three old books to every new one. It’s good for us.

For that matter, this is why I advocate reading English translations of the Great Books which were translated prior to the 1950’s (and preferably in the late 1800’s) because they tend to have more exalted vocabularies. They also tend to be less prone to ideological manipulation (I don’t say completely so). The majority of modern Humanities and Classics departments in Western universities are overrun with critical theorists who have an axe to grind (Emily Wilson’s Odyssey is a case in point). Their language is almost always more narrow and it is very often tainted with an agenda.

So let’s do the work of rebuilding our vocabularies and scorn these modern follies. Why not keep another commonplace journal, this one not for quotes, but, rather, for words which are new to you? Make your own dictionary of sorts with words worth knowing and adding to your own writing and speech? If we take this seriously we will become more capable of expressing just the right ideas at just the right time and we can give powers back to the English language which it is currently losing. We can also enshrine this practice into the education of our children and thereby repair the ruins.

Increasing our vocabulary is an important step in the appreciation of language and its powers to communicate truth and expose falsehoods, but it’s not the whole picture. Simply being a walking dictionary and thesaurus is not the goal. The goal is to be able to communicate truth and to articulate ideas well. Part of excellent communication is style. We must not only increase our arsenal, we must become tacticians in the deployment of our resources to win the battle. The battleground is the heart and mind, first in us and then in our fellows. Learning to argue logically is very important, it’s something everyone who takes truth seriously ought to devote themselves to, but the truth is that beauty is a powerful weapon (and perhaps an even more powerful weapon than reason) when it comes to persuasion.

Aristotle’s Rhetoric shows us that God has so constituted mankind that there are three things which tend to persuade him into adopting a new idea or perspective. Those three forms of persuasion are logos (reason), ethos (character), and pathos (emotion). Beauty is perhaps the strongest tool in pathos’ kit. Physical beauty has persuaded many a man right out of his wits. Beauty of language, well worded poetry (song) and prose moves souls in profound ways.

In a previous article I gave the example of the following three sentences (here in a different order):

“The moonlight struck the water’s surface and refracted its rays back towards the sky.”

“The moon shined and bounced off the water.”

“The moon’s light caressed the surface of the water and gave itself back to God.”

The first is more akin to a scientific description, the second is just drab and ugly, the third (though not Shakespeare) is significantly more beautiful in expression. Though all three sentences more or less say the same thing, the way they say it matters. Learning to order our words in a sentence to have more pleasing arrangements (diction) and to make use of figures of speech (like anthropomorphism, simile, and metaphor) do wonders to our ability to communicate well and to move our hearers or readers.

Anyone who is concerned with respecting language will take into consideration the value of embellishment for the sake of beauty and persuasion. It is, of course, proper to know one’s audience. We persuade differently at a biology conference than we do through a novel, but in all such cases there is something to be won by not only increasing our vocabulary but also by learning to order our language well as suits the occasion.

Let me start out by saying (since I feel the gotchya coming) that I am far from being as proficient in grammar, syntax, punctuation, etc., as I’d like to be. You’re likely to find an error in this essay which I missed during proofing. So I am not attacking those who try and fail (like me) to write well. I am addressing something else.

It has become commonplace, typically among teens and youngish adults, to drop the practice of capitalization and punctuation (at least in informal writing). I want to call those who are doing this to repentance. The main reason I have heard given for this is that “it sounds too formal and unfriendly,” but, in reality, I think it results from having been deeply infected by the relativity and “whateverness” of the age and/or the critical theory which seeks to invert perceived authority and power structures, reading everything it can through a lens of oppression. I don’t dare to say that all who are writing without punctuation and capitalization are intentionally thinking of it like this, I simply think that they have been caught up in the torrent of human custom without even realizing it.

From hieroglyphics, to the conical shapes of some early Semitic forms of writing, to uncial scripts where the words run together without breaks between, to more modern forms of writing, the progression has been toward increasing clarity. Many of us have seen the joke that says “punctuation saves lives” followed by:

“Let’s eat grandma.”

versus

“Let’s eat, grandma.”

It’s funny, but the point carries all the same. Punctuation clarifies. Capitalization also communicates things like where a new sentence begins and whether a noun is proper or common. Is a word plural or possessive? In a language like English it’s all dependent upon the punctuation to find out.

What some people think sounds “more friendly and less harsh” really comes off as less clear and more ignorant. As to those who say, “Well, I’d never write that way in a formal paper,” my response is this: you become more like what you do on a regular basis. Virtues and vices are habits formed by repetitious behavior. There is no way that writing like that most of the time will fail to undermine your ability to write well and with clarity when you suddenly need it.

Our ancestors labored upon the written word for many centuries to raise it to such a height as what we see in Austen, Dickens, Tolstoy, and Tolkien. What right do we have to belittle those efforts as “unfriendly and harsh?” Why was it, I wonder, that no one until the present generation took offense at clarity? This is a product of the hyper-sensitivity of our age that is always ready to be offended and constantly longing to topple what has been built up in the past. If you love the written word then you will commit to using it, even on social media and in text messaging, in a way that suggests you respect the heritage you’ve been handed.

Speaking of hyper-offended trends, let’s talk about gender-infused language, shall we? This one goes back a bit further, surely at least to the 1960’s and the sexual revolution and the beginning of second-wave feminism. At some point someone got the bright idea that what was really oppressive to women was acknowledging that women and men are different. Now, of course, there have always been abusive men in the world who mistreat women. Let’s all agree to boo and hiss and, indeed, scorn such fools as think they are superior to half the race based upon their pre-determined genitalia. Nonsense. But let’s also agree to boo, hiss, and scorn the fools who think men and women are the same.

Somehow many women were deceived into thinking that if they really wanted to be treated like equals then they must become (functionally) men. Never was a more silly transaction ever made. Women are the glory of the human race. Without women there are no men. Women beautify and civilize society. Have you ever seen before and after pictures of a bachelor’s home who just got married? Uncanny.

Women are, in every respect that concerns value, equal to men. But they are not men. Thank God.

Men and women are alternately superior to one another at many tasks, but altogether equal in value. Generally speaking, men are stronger than women. It’s a biological fact. Women alone can grow new people in their wombs (which is a super-power without parallel in the world). This is also a biological fact. These two biological facts have for almost all of human history ordered the relationship between men and women. Men protect and provide, women nourish and support.

In the modern world we have decided this is offensive and oppressive and we have tried to topple this “power structure.” What we have very nearly managed to do is topple civilization itself. What happens when a society finally manages to eliminate the Christian worldview which reveres women for their God-given role? You get only beastly men who won’t care one whit about women’s rights and who are still stronger than women (fact). The UK is starting to learn something about this right now. We would do well to pay attention.

What hath all this to do with language? Language is and always has been power. Whoever controls words controls the debate. Unwittingly, for the most part, many Christians today have gone along with things they never should have permitted. We have allowed our language to be stripped of gender-specific terminology. Steward and Stewardess? No, flight attendants. Actor and actress? No, just actors. Poet and Poetess? No, just poets. There are countless such instances. It has reached the heights of absurdity today where people are rejecting classic pronouns such as “his” and “her” or “he” and “she” for all kinds of “ze” and “zer” and “zip, zoop, zorps” (okay, I made that last bit up…as far as I know).

Christians, and sane people in general, should resist the attempt to flatten the sexes into one androgynous nightmare. We should intentionally preserve gender-infused terminology and use it in our everyday speech and writing as a way of resisting this madness. Many people say “English is not an inflected language,” but this is, in fact, false. It is not highly inflected like Greek and Latin (where the endings of the word determine their part of speech), we depend on word order for that, but our language has inflexion and much of it has historically been gendered inflexion. Part of becoming a master or mistress of language involves insisting on the clarity that comes from using gendered language. Why should anyone ever have to ask whether the actor or poet just referred to is male or female when we have inflections which will automatically announce this? If you have not gone so mad as to be offended by “he” or “she” then please get back to using “waiter” and “waitress” or “landlord” and “Landlady,” etc., etc.

Far from oppressive, gendered language affirms God’s design and the beautiful and harmonious distinction between the sexes. The man or woman who cannot be at home in his or her own skin and who cannot affirm the goodness of the distinct sexes will simply be a plague to all those around him or her. Don’t play into the hands of the “progressives” (digressives is more like) or give them a leg up by using gender neutral language. Affirm that God made man in his own image, male and female, gloriously different and equally precious in his sight!

I’ll make one last point (though I am sure there are many other angles worthy of consideration here) as I talk about respecting language. Since I titled this article “Watch Your Language!” I might as well talk a bit about what is variously referred to as “cursing” or “swearing” or “vulgar” language. I actually feel rather strongly about this point as well. I think Christians should set the bar in exemplary speech in all regards. Christians should be winsome articulators and defenders of truth, they should master language by gaining robust vocabularies and learn to wield them in beautiful poetry and prose, they should honor their ancestors work in developing a highly precise language (of which punctuation and capitalization play an important role), and they should affirm the created order with the proper use of gendered language. Christians should also set the bar in the use of appropriate language and not falling to the lowest common-denominator of speech.

I would like to make a few distinctions here. For one, I don’t think all “strong language” is forbidden to Christians in all circumstances, but I do think we should be led by the teaching of the Scriptures which tells us to “Let there be no filthiness nor foolish talk nor crude joking, which are out of place, but instead let there be thanksgiving.” 6 Further, “The heart of the wise makes his speech judicious and adds persuasiveness to his lips.”7 Also, our Lord reminds us “out of the abundance of the heart the mouth speaks.”8 And of wicked and unregenerate men the Scriptures say “Their mouth is full of curses and bitterness.”9 Finally, James exhorts believers, saying:

What is very clear in these passages of Scripture (and a great deal more could be cited) is that the words we use matters and ought not to flow freely or unrestrainedly. Much of what is called “profanity” or “cursing” or some other similar name results from passion and sinful anger in the heart and is, therefore, out of order among Christians. Our language should always be “gracious, seasoned with salt”11 so that we might use our words to great effect for the sake of the advancement of the kingdom of God. I think we are rather hard-pressed to see how the “F” word and even supposedly lesser offenses are legitimately used by Christian writers and speakers in most (if not all) circumstances.

It is, of course, true that the Bible uses some rather strong language at times. It does not hold back to call certain people and nations “whores” and when it refers to our righteous deeds as “dirty rags” the translation softens that because what it really infers is “menstrual cloths.” There are numerous cases where the Bible, and even Jesus himself, intentionally uses strong and offensive language, but it never does so as a part of common speech or without direct purpose that fits the situation. Many people use the “F” word and other offenders as every part of speech in a sentence, it’s the noun, the adjective, and the verb all at once! They do this not because it is fitting to the situation, but because they find themselves without vocabulary to express rightfully their own thoughts and feelings. Such people are merely emoting loudly one of the 10-20 words they know. This kind of vulgarity is always unbecoming of a Christian (and everyone else really, but we are called to a higher standard).

If I am going to call someone a “bastard” then let them actually not know who their father is or let their situation be such that the term bastard has a kind of metaphorical fit to their situation. I shouldn’t just call everyone I don’t like a bastard. Strong language should fit, it should be used when the situation calls for it, and it should be rare because otherwise it loses all its force. Constant foul language expresses nothing but a low IQ or (at least) the appearance of one. On the other hand, when a well-spoken and genteel man calls someone a whore…it means something quite serious. The fact that he doesn’t daily call women or other people whores places quite an emphasis upon the fact that he has just called this person a whore.

Again, I would call for us to be very careful in the use of any such strong language. I think it most befits the believer to largely have such language absent from his or her speech, but if ever it must be used then let it befit the person and situation and let it thunder for its rarity in our speech. Christians should not casually say “damn you” for we believe hell and damnation are quite real. So if we say that something “be damned” we mean it quite literally. So, it’s not something to say to a friend or even about an enemy with lightheartedness. Apply the lesson all around to the other “swear words” and the point holds all over.

I hope you will join me in taking language seriously, in honoring it as a gift from God which is charged with moral responsibility, as a precious resource that has been honed and sharpened for centuries by our forebears, as a thing which we should not simply abandon to the whims of culture, and which we should wield to the glory of God and in pursuit of truth, goodness, and beauty and against what is false, evil, and ugly. Upholding and nurturing the power of language starts with us and we must teach our children to love it as well.

The following is a message I will be delivering tomorrow to the students of the school where I work as the Upper School Dean. Our school has four festival weeks each year, the activities of which revolve around the life and work of the figureheads for our school’s House System (C. S. Lewis, J. R. R. Tolkien, R. L. Green, and Dorothy L. Sayers). I have the privilege of once again delivering the “Sayers Lecture” as I did last year.

Dorothy L. Sayers once lamented that “the popular mind has grown so confused that it is no longer able to receive any statement of fact except as an expression of personal feeling.”1 The convenience and advantage of relegating any claim another person makes, which does not suit one’s fancy, to the domain of mere opinion is obvious. Propositions must either be true or false as they make a claim about objective reality, but opinions are merely expressions about what one likes or doesn’t like. If one takes the statement “Jesus is Lord of all” to simply mean that “I like Jesus” then there is nothing really to respond to. One does not typically feel a strong impulse to debate someone over their personal feelings. When someone says to me “I like pineapple on my pizza” I may very well judge them for their lack of good sense or taste, but I certainly don’t respond to them by saying “No you don’t!” Similarly, if one takes “Jesus is Lord of all” to simply mean “I like Jesus” then some people might find that distasteful, but they rarely (if ever) respond by saying “No you don’t!” We generally acknowledge that people know what they like or don’t like and that is that.

But, if the statement “Jesus is Lord of all” is taken as the actual proposition it is then the whole matter takes on a very different angle, for “Lord” is a title of sovereignty and rule and authority and the prepositional phrase “of all” offers no limitations to the extent of the domain of this Lordship, which means that the statement’s claim is that all people, and indeed all things in the whole of the universe, are subject to the rule of Jesus. This is quite different than simply affirming “I like Jesus.” This is to state that not only is the speaker under the Lordship of Christ, but that in fact so is the hearer and everyone else and all people owe him their allegiance, fealty, obedience, and adoration. Such a claim, taken as the proposition it actually is and not merely as a statement about someone’s feelings, demands a response in the affirmative or the negative from the hearer. It does not leave him the opportunity to simply respond “that’s nice for you.”

The sentence “Jesus is Lord of all” actually has the same qualitative existence as sentences like “Abraham Lincoln was the sixteenth president of the United States” and “Four times four is sixteen” and “The moon is made out of cheese” and many other such sentences which are in fact statements (propositions) which are either true or false by their very nature. One might not know whether a given statement is true or false, having never been to the moon and being a bit shaky on American history, etc., but any given statement is either true or false regardless of how we feel or whether or not we are able to determine which truth value it holds.

Abraham Lincoln was in fact the sixteenth president of the United States of America. Claiming he was so is not a matter of opinion or feeling, but a claim about the very nature of reality and that claim turns out to be true. Not every statement that is made coheres with reality. Claims which do not correspond with the way things actually are (or were, or will be) must be acknowledged to be false. Nevertheless, it is in the very nature of statements to be either true or false (and not both at the same time or in the same way) and to simply relegate statements to the realm of opinion or feeling is to bury one’s head in the sand and refuse to grapple with reality.

Of course, it must be said that many people are simply not concerned with coming to grips with reality. Sayers noted in her own day the fact that the professional journalists were “not interested in the facts” but were happy to produce “deliberate falsifications.” She further noted that this la ze faire attitude towards manipulating the truth and ignoring facts, both in “the Press and the Law,” was a result of the simple fact that “the public do not care whether they are being told the truth or not.”2

If this confusion of statements of fact for mere feelings, as well as a general apathy to know and believe what is really true and to demand that we be given the truth by the media and the government, was already in such sad shape in 1941 then it certainly has not improved in the intervening years. If the Western World’s grip on reality was tenuous in Sayers’ day then it is tethered only by a hangnail today.

Two questions seem to rise to the top in light of all of this, namely, “How did we get here?” and “How do we fix this?”

As to the first question, we might note that a funny thing happened to the pursuit of truth in the Enlightenment period. During this unprecedented time of scientific discovery we also experienced an unprecedented loss. Paradoxically, as we began to learn many new things through the employment of the scientific method we found ourselves divorced from the ability to really know anything at all. Claiming to be wise, we became fools. We made our new engine of discovery, which rested upon an ordered universe made from the mind of our Maker, and we set it up as an idol to be worshipped. The method replaced the Maker in our hearts and we have been paying for our idolatry ever since.

Though Hume was not alone in this project of wiping away the horizon with a sponge, he stated with the most dramatic flair what many in the Enlightenment were advocating for, a rejection of any so-called knowledge which was not verifiable by the scientific method. Hume wrote:

In one broad swipe most of what men and women for centuries past would have said could be known, and known with assurance, was wiped away by Hume. Religion, moral philosophy, aesthetics, metaphysics, and, in short, anything which attends to that with is not strictly material, observable with the five senses, or mathematically quantifiable, was tossed out. The belief of Hume and many other dupes (often brilliant dupes in their own way) was that this move would allow men to pursue truth without distraction from things which merely belonged to the realm of feelings and faith (which were taken as being always diametrically opposed to reason). They thought that in clearing the table of all that nonsense they would finally be able to get down to brass tacks and increase human knowledge a hundred-fold.

C. S. Lewis, in his most important work, The Abolition of Man, explains how this ivory-tower philosophy (or anti-philosophy if you will) trickled down into the whole of society through college educated fools becoming the teachers of children. He speaks of two men (whom he graciously called Gaius and Titius rather than exposing their real names) who wrote an English textbook, which he calls “The Green Book,” and explains how this very same perspective which Hume articulated became a presupposition in many schools and in the impressionable hearts of children while being taught under the guise of an English or literary education. Having taught children to disregard all statements about moral and aesthetic judgment as mere sentiments that can be safely ignored he said that “Gaius and Titius, while teaching [the student] nothing about letters, have cut out of his soul, long before he is old enough to choose, the possibility of having certain experiences which thinkers of more authority than they have held to be generous, fruitful, and humane.”4 Lewis went on to remind his reader that “Until quite modern times all teachers and even all men believed the universe to be such that certain emotional reactions on our part could be either congruous or incongruous to it—believed, in fact, that objects did not merely receive, but could merit, our approval or disapproval, our reverence or our contempt.” In fact Aristotle said the entire purpose of education “is to make the pupil like and dislike what he ought.”5 It cannot be overstated that Enlightenment philosophy literally overturned the entire order of things by turning all value judgments into mere sentimentality and by arguing that all sentiments can be justly and safely ignored.

The results of this have been, however, quite devastating. On the one hand it is quite undeniable that scientific “advancement” or “progress” of a sort has not only continued but hastened since the Enlightenment. Whether these things are always really progress or not would demand some sort of telos or end goal, a good in mind that is being aimed at, in order for us to know if we are indeed progressing, but such a telos is rarely in view among the scientists and technocrats of our day who are led by bare curiosity (at best) and sheer greed (at worst) as they simply make. The literate illiterate do not read, and if they do read they do not understand, works like Shelley’s Frankenstein which commend us to ask “ought I to do this” rather than only “can it be done?” But, all that being said, the scientific method works, it produces, it yields results and we live in a society which is the product of those results apart from much thought of things like “the good” because one cannot taste, touch, hear, smell, or see “the good” nor quantify it in an equation and therefore we do not bother about it.

All of that said, there is an undeniable sense in which it can be said that human knowledge (not so much individually, but perhaps collectively) has increased since the Enlightenment, particularly in regard to material production of goods and technology. Despite all of this productivity, however, there is another sense in which it must be acknowledged that human knowledge was obliterated in the Enlightenment. For one, as stated above, a tremendous swathe of human knowledge was dismissed as mere feeling and sentiment and labeled as non-knowledge. If this had been all that resulted from the Enlightenment shift, that is to say if the philosophers of scientism had gotten all that they wanted and nothing else, it would surely have been detrimental enough (and it has proved to be very detrimental), but that was not all that came of it. Then something happened that the scientists did not intend. In their impetuousness they wiped away more than they desired. Somehow in all of their great wisdom they missed the fact that “truth” itself is not a material, tangible, or quantifiable reality. Truth, like goodness and beauty, is a value judgment.

The study of knowledge, what it is and how it is attained, is called epistemology. In the Enlightenment the West was hood-winked into believing that the primary knower was the individual self and that the primary means of knowing was the individual’s senses applied to laboratory experimentation and mathematical reasoning. It was a moment that, in all of human history, perhaps came closest to mimicking the first great ruse of the ancient charlatan, the serpent, when in the garden he said “you will not surely die.” For knowledge does not depend on man, but on God. God is the eternal knower and truth corresponds not only to reality but to his knowledge of reality as he is the ground and source of all reality. The Enlightenment swap was very much like the sin of the Garden where man was convinced by a snake that they could ascend to the place of God and, like Adam and Eve, we believed it like fools and have been found naked.

You have perhaps heard of the old question “If a tree falls in the forest, and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?” If truth and reality depend upon the observation of human persons then there is not only no sound but there is no tree nor any forest if there is no individual experiencing them with their senses. You might think I am being silly and unreasonable in saying this, but if you do then I suggest you read more philosophy since the Enlightenment period because, taking Hume and others like him seriously, it was soon realized that our senses are severely limited in scope and that they are also subject to deception. Questions began to populate in philosophical circles about whether one could even say it was really possible to know anything external to one’s own mind. Immanuel Kant has some very fascinating discourses about looking at trees and wondering whether we can determine if they exist out in the world or only in the mind (and don’t get some other philosophers started on whether or not you even exist to be reading this right now). Philosophical inquiry has only spiralled downward since then and the conclusion reached by many today is post-modernism, the notion that nothing can actually be known for certain.

It was one very short step in human history from the celebration of the supremacy of the human intellect and sense perception and the scientific method’s ability to guide us into all truth, to the conclusion that truth is actually completely unknowable (merely a social construct) and that we must despair even at the attempt to acquire it. In a catastrophic reversal of expectation when the Enlightenment philosophers relegated all metaphysical claims to mere feelings in an attempt to pursue scientific truth, they put to death our ability to know truth and were left only with base feelings as a guide. Adam and Eve swapped life for death and we have swapped knowledge for ignorance.

It explains a lot, really, when you look around today. The news headlines are full of madness. Men who think they are women because their feelings tell them so, murderers being protected while the slaughtering of innocent babies is applauded. We have truly lost our minds and all of it, so we thought, in the pursuit of truth and knowledge. We have exchanged the truth about God for a lie and worshipped the Enlightenment idol rather than the Creator and we are living out the rest of Romans 1 right now.

So much for “how we got here” and now on to “How do we fix this?” The answer is given to us among the wise, and of the wise I shall let Sayers, Lewis, and Pieper speak to us as representative voices. Most importantly, though, we will look to the Lord Jesus himself for the solution.

To cut to the chase, as they say, the solution is this: we must reacquaint ourselves with reality.

In the first chapter of her book, The Mind of the Maker, Sayers makes an important distinction between two usages of the word “law,” one being arbitrary and the other being descriptive of brute reality. The former she represents by the laws or rules which guide the sport of Cricket (just like a Brit, you know) in which the rules are created by men and the consequences of playing or failing to play by those rules are enforced by consensus. The laws of a given society often fall into this category as well, such as setting a particular speed limit on a particular road. Such laws, whether in regard to something like a sport or pertaining to civil government, she notes only hold up under two conditions.

Sayers tells us that “The first condition is that public opinion shall strongly endorse the law.”6 If there is not enough consensus to support the law then it really cannot be and will not be enforced. This is why you see laws either overturned in the legislature or simply ignored into oblivion when the weight of public opinion comes to disregard them. Sometimes a law is ignored because it is unjust, other times it is ignored because the people ignoring it are unjust, but regardless if there is too much opposition it is overruled legally or practically.

“The second condition” for the preservation of an arbitrary law, Sayers tells us, is “that the arbitrary law shall not run counter to the law of nature.”7 When Sayers said that there are two usages of the word “law” this was the other she meant. She states “In its other use, the word ‘law’ is employed to designate a generalized statement of observed fact of one sort or another.”8 In this sense “law” simply refers to unalterable and incontrovertible reality. There is nothing arbitrary about it. We did not make it and cannot make it other than it is.

What happens when a society tries to impose an arbitrary law (or ways of life) in contradiction to natural law? Sayers tells us the answer in the clearest of terms.

In other words, it is useless to dash our brains out against reality. Reality always wins in the end. The problem modern man faces is this: do we continue to dig our heels in and insist that we stay on the path that Hume, Kant and others of their kind took us down or do we go back to where we took a wrong turn? As the inestimable Lewis said,

Evidence that we took a wrong turn is everywhere, but fixing the problem begins with admitting the problem. We must acknowledge that the shift from God as ground of all knowledge and truth to attempting to ground it in finite man has been disastrous. We can even, I believe, extricate the scientific method from the clutches of scientism and redeem science by placing it back into the hand of our Maker. As it is we are robbing from Christian reality (the steady laws of a fixed universe which we can always count on to behave in a certain way) to try to feed our nihilistic desires while offering no thanks. But the modern scientific endeavor began with the acknowledgement of the Maker and it can return to it. Not only would this not hinder the productivity of science and technology, it would give it the telos it has been lacking so that it might better serve mankind.

If we do not repent of our ways we can be sure that our society will dash its nihilistic brains upon the rocks of natural law. Indeed, what difference is there between jumping off cliffs while screaming “I don’t believe in gravity” and much of the denial of reality we currently see in our culture? We cannot survive this direction in the long run, we must surely repent or perish.

Sayers, once again, writes “The more closely the moral code [of a society] agrees with the natural law, the more it makes for freedom in human behavior; the more widely it departs from the natural law, the more it tends to enslave mankind and to produce the catastrophes called ‘judgments of God.’”11 Further, she states, “Societies which do not share Christian opinion about human values are logically quite justified in repudiating the code based on that opinion. If, however, Christian opinion turns out to be right about the facts of nature, then the dissenting societies are exposing themselves to that judgment of catastrophe which awaits those who defy natural law.”12

In other words, it’s no good complaining about Christians and their moral code as if they were simply spouting arbitrary law which does not currently have the weight of public consensus on its side. No, if Christianity is true then the moral code which proceeds from it is sound regardless of whether it currently has the societal consensus or not. Though men may insist they can get across an impossibly large gorge if they just run and leap with enough energy, the Christian is simply pointing out that only the nicely constructed solid bridge will really do.

The secular experiment has failed. We have wrecked ourselves upon the rock of reality. Secularism is presently a smoldering ruin before us and, already, rushing in on all sides are a myriad of other worldly philosophies clamoring to take their turn at leaping into the abyss, but they will not do. The way forward is back. We won’t progress by trying some new absurdity, we must attune ourselves back to reality.

As Josef Pieper so winsomely wrote “All duty is based upon being. Reality is the basis of ethics. Goodness is the standard of reality….Conformity to reality is the principle of both soundness and goodness.”13 Simply look around! Listen and see. Things are not as they should be. Are you not tired and weary of what you see? Perhaps tired and weary of what you yourself are doing? What we need is a way of life and being which coheres with, rather than dashes itself against, reality. Simply put, what we need is the way of Christ. Jesus says to us:

The commands of Christ may seem difficult, but only at first, and only because they are so contrary to the way of the present world. It is not long down the road that Christ leads us, however, that we begin to feel the weight of the world fall off our backs. The way of Jesus is against the flow of our present culture, but it is with the flow of reality and truth itself. When we walk in Jesus’ way we do not dash ourselves into oblivion, rather we begin to thrive as we fall into step with how “the human machine”15 was meant to operate. The more of us who, as individuals, go back to the place where we diverged from truth and take the better road the more society as a whole will begin to right itself. The key to fixing society at large is taking seriously the need to fix our own selves.

Jesus said it all when he said “I am the way, the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me.”16 He was not expressing a mere opinion, he was offering a proposition which is either true or false. For the last several hundred years society has been travelling down a road which has not even bothered to say “this is false” but rather only that Jesus’ statement “is nonsense.” But nonsense is exactly what we have gotten for ignoring his claim.

The Christian faith is not only reasonable, it is perfectly applied reason. Whether it is “Do not murder” or “have no other gods before me” or “love your neighbor as yourself” or “in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them” these are not arbitrary notions, but witnesses to reality itself. The God who is really there, the I AM, the backstop of all being, the source of our existence and the measure of truth, the objective knower, he is calling us back to himself and to the road of true reason. Reject madness, embrace life. Tell Humian philosophy and postmodernity to go to hell and then follow Jesus.