The Missing Gap in Classical Christian Education
The world of classical education is fond of C. S. Lewis. And rightly so. Without using the term “classical education,” his Abolition of Man clearly shows the hollowness at the core of modern, progressive schools; classical Christian educators have been providing a better alternative for many decades. His winsome and creative children’s stories are included in classical Christian school curriculum far and wide. His apologetic and literary works are accessible to high school students and trained scholars alike. What may be less understood in the world of classical education is that, while Lewis himself possessed great native intelligence, his influence without a doubt would be far less had he not been immersed in a disciplined study of that synthesis of the classical and the Christian which we now call “medieval.”
Lewis himself said that he was a “medieval man.” In 1954, in his inaugural address De Descriptione Temporum, at Cambridge as the chair of Medieval and Renaissance English, he described himself as a native of the medieval era. This is a mature, seasoned reflection on his educational calling. He said, “I read as a native, texts you must read as foreigners.” He continues: “…Where I fail as a critic, I may yet be useful as a specimen. I would even dare to go further. Speaking not only for myself but for all other Old Western men whom you may meet, I would say, use your specimens while you can. There are not going to be many more dinosaurs.”
The question before Anglican educators is: Are we cultivating medieval students—dinosaurs, in Lewis’ terminology? And why do we want to? If we aim to help our students be counter-cultural adults, to engage, live, and thrive for the Kingdom in the culture of advanced modernity, into what positive world are we then enculturating them? A Christianized advanced modernity with a patina of Plato will not do. C. S. Lewis, for one, was medieval to the core. But what do we mean by “medieval”?
One of Lewis’ main points in De Descriptione Temporum is that the greatest divide in history is not between the Dark Ages and Renaissance. “If we do not put the Great Divide between the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, where should we put it?” he asks. In the rest of the address, Lewis makes a strong argument that the dividing line—what he came “…to regard as the greatest of all divisions in the history of the West [is] that which divides the present from, say, the age of Jane Austen.” The great divide is between the pre-modern and modernity.
Modernity is the biggest change and challenge in the history of Western Civilization. And now modernity itself has run its course, so that we are living amid a historic inflection point, a “hinge moment,” from the collapse of modernity to who-knows-what. Whatever the near future holds, and it is impossible to predict, the Church must prepare and equip the next generation to face this unknown with a greater resilience and discernment than is typical of our efforts. Casual, half-hearted approaches will not do in such a time of historic import. Now is the opportune moment to return to the long-abandoned pre-modern mind, in the form of the medieval synthesis of the classical and Christian. This mindset was abandoned not because it was untrue or ineffective. It was abandoned because it was inconvenient to an increasingly man-centric view of reality.
To be equipped for a post-postmodern world, we must return to a pre-modern mindset. That sounds very strange to the average American. “Why would I want to be so ignorant and uneducated as a medieval person?” we can hear the critics say. “The Dark Ages were dark, after all.” We may have heard the phrase “positively medieval” used to denigrate someone or something. But actually, this mindset is backward. Ours is the dark ages, the age of disenchantment, the deathwork. As philosopher Peter Kreeft writes, “We are now living in the real Dark Ages, which history books of the future will describe as ‘The Century of Genocide.'”
In addition to the “great divide” Lewis wrote of, he also points out two great spiritual revolutions in Western civilization: the first was from pre-Christian to Christian, but the second is from Christian to post-Christian—and is happening now. Furthermore, Lewis observed, “It appears to me that the second change is even more radical than the first (as divorce is more traumatic than marriage).” Lewis rightly said that the pagan and Christian have more in common than each has with the post-Christian. With the collapse of modernity, evidenced by the shift to the post-Christian, what is needed is a shift back to the variety of Christianity untainted as far as possible by the Enlightenment or modernity—a form completely different from what Kreeft describes as “accommodation to modernism, egalitarianism, niceness, naturalism, pop psychology, secular humanism, relativism, subjectivism, individualism, “Enlightenment” rationalism or postmodern irrationalism.” And this alternate variety, the synthesis of the classical and the Christian, is what we might call “positively medieval.”
And we do not have a lot of time. Our children are living amid the ethos of this spiritual divorce. Three generations is all the time it takes for the foundations of a spiritual frame to be completely washed away. What of our grandchildren? It is of them that we now speak. It took three generations for the children of the leaders of William Wilberforce’s Clapham Sect to become the leaders of the debauched Bloomsbury Group. And the cultural and technological forces arrayed against our children are far, far greater than those that faced Bloomsbury leader Virginia Woolfe, granddaughter of Henry Thornton, founder of the Clapham Sect.
So the future of classical education has to be medieval. Yes, many people are doing good work, but the current fad of classical education—the “movement”—is only classical in some particulars. It is far from the classical education that flourished in the medieval world. It has Latin and often Greek; it is concerned to read the great books (at least in some places); it teaches formal logic and rhetoric; but so often, the worldview and philosophical foundations are modern, even progressive. It is often cognitivist, Gnostic, and nominal. Gone is a sacramentalist frame of mind that sees life embedded in a larger cosmic narrative.
Flannery O’Connor warned that we must push back against culture as hard as it is pushing against us. In most of our schools, we are not. Too often, we classical educators have merely replaced the industrial stamp used for educating young citizens and workers for the last 150 years with a stamp that says Trivium on it. We’re still stuck in the factory production mode—just stamping out “classically educated” citizens instead of good factory worker citizens. This is not sufficient for the challenges that our students are going to face in their coming world.
Recovering the medieval mind is far more than a pedagogical process of teaching ancient books or learning Latin. It will take adopting a new frame on how one sees the world, whereby the spiritual is infused in all reality. Hans Boersma argues that contemporary culture tends to define the world by what is observable: i.e. empiricism. “Often,” he says,
we do not go beyond the world of the senses. But the premodern world saw this-worldly, material things (the objects that we perceive empirically) as related, or linked to greater, other-worldly, spiritual realities. The presence of the Word of God in creation is a real presence, not just an imaginary presence. Everything that we observe, for a premodern mind, was connected sacramentally to the eternal Logos or Word of God, in which they all cohere. If this is the correct perspective (which I think it is), then everything we observe with the senses is like a small-s sacrament, in which the Logos makes himself present in some way.
The medieval mind assumed that there was a spiritual connection between the natural world and human events. Matter was never just matter, a dead object, but a living thing infused with a real spiritual presence and purpose. Boersma argues that a medieval frame of mind was sacramental, and historian Chris Armstrong would agree: “Lewis’s love of concrete and common things—trees, mountains, weather—was not just aesthetic but sacramental: he wrote ‘every created thing is, in its degree, an image of God, and the ordinate and faithful appreciation of that thing a clue which, truly followed, will lead back to Him.”
Such a vision of reality is largely absent from most Protestant forms of classical education; but we in the liturgical, historic churches have the opportunity—and ability—to re-infuse a sacramental spirit into our educational endeavors.
Without such a re-infusion, we run the risk of adopting classical components—the Socratic method, rhetoric, Latin—without incarnating the classical Christian mindset as a whole. The central theological lens of the medieval mind is the lens of sacramentalism. The reasonable question we must ask is whether one can have a biblical worldview (much less a classical Christian one) without affirming the sacramental nature of reality. Sacramentalism, the answer to the twin errors of Gnosticism and materialism, is vital to our students.
So then, how is this medieval, sacramental mind cultivated?
First, students should thoroughly understand medieval history, culture, and ideas. They should be articulate in appreciating the medieval synthesis. But if medieval history is ignored or filtered through a modern Enlightenment lens (with an anti-catholic bias that throws the baby out with the bathwater), students encounter the medieval age of enchantment through Modernist, disenchanting assumptions. The beauty and wonder of the medieval age are sadly distorted.
Second, students should be exposed to primary sources. Lewis encouraged reading medieval literature and philosophy directly, rather than relying solely on modern interpretations. He believed that direct engagement with texts like Dante’s The Divine Comedy, Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales, and Boethius’ The Consolation of Philosophy could help one understand how medieval people thought about the world.
Third, students must learn to see the universe as a structured, hierarchical cosmos, to see the interconnectedness of all things. Medieval cosmology might be so old as to be completely new, but it is important to understand the world that classical education helped to create and came from.
Fourth, and related but distinct, students need to learn to use allegory and symbolism to convey deeper truths. Here a close study of The Chronicles of Narnia as unveiled by Michael Ward’s Planet Narnia: The Seven Heavens in the Imagination of C.S. Lewis might be helpful. Ward writes, “Lewis was attempting to convey numerous aspects of medieval life in the Narnia Chronicles: language, dress, polity, geography, cosmology, and cartography are all presented so as to communicate a sense of the Middle Ages.”[10] Rarely is Narnia taught in this manner, so students may get the plot but lose the meaning.
Finally, students need to adopt the epistemological humility of the medieval mind, which focused on understanding the world as it is rather than attempting to reshape it according to human desire. This is not the spirit of our age. Lewis did not say, “Education without values, as useful as it is, seems rather to make man a more clever devil.” But he might have said, “Education without a true spiritual formation in virtue, as practically useful as it might be, runs the risk of creating a more clever devil.” To gain the knowledge and skills of a sophisticated education without the humility to use it in service of God and others provides an intoxicating temptation to many people to use it to their own advantage.
Collectively, this will lead to an exciting re-enchanted view of reality that is so longed for by our students. All of life becomes a grand adventure in experiencing God’s real presence. Cognition will give way to experience, disenchantment to enchantment, darkness to light, death to life, prose to poetry, poetry to music, reason to wonder, and wonder to worship. Such is a medievalism worth embracing.
Ultimately, for such a perspective to be embodied, more than mere classroom instruction is required. Such formation requires living in an alternative community framed by worship, inspired by beauty, instructed by nature, and which touches all aspects of a student’s day. Such instruction, in medieval Christian humanism, can best be formative when the student is immersed in a community where the distracting variables are reduced, and the liturgy of worship frames the day. A boarding school culture is one very good to way to accomplish these aims. (And it is no accident that the medieval synthesis of the classical and the Christian began largely in the monasteries: intentional, sequestered communities centered around worship. But that may be the topic for another article).
Classical education has caught on and is popular among many aspiring students and parents. Christian schools celebrate Lewis, Tolkien, and Chesterton, but we want students to know that their genius and their Christian minds were cultivated over a lifetime of disciplined study of the medievals, selective mentorship within the church, and daily habits of worship and study. In this way perhaps, we will disciple students who follow in that train, to be positively medieval.
Image Credit: Unsplash.
