From the President

Dear Reader,

This issue of our bulletin includes articles that show two sides of the imagination. Senior Fellow Erik Ellis expresses why as a humanist scholar he values how the Quadrivium provides an objective basis for understanding and instantiating beauty, while Emily Kwilinski writes of the joys she has found as an adult in returning to the imaginative literature of her youth (we include a few selections from Lucy Maud Montgomery’s Anne of Green Gables series to give you a taste).

The Quadrivium has been much on my mind of late. I am writing this introductory note from the Pascal Instituut in Leiden in the Netherlands. As with our Boethius Fellows, Jeff Lehman and I are beginning a second year of teaching the Quadrivium to a small group of very bright students working towards PhDs in a Great Books program. We have begun each year with a week of in-person classes, grounding our teacher/student relations in personal interaction that is impossible with Zoom meetings alone. We have broken bread together, while having conversations that range from Leiden’s dramatic fight for independence in the 1570s to the character of Cassius in Julius Caesar, to whether equality of opportunity is a good to be desired or perhaps a justice to be insisted upon.

In a walking conversation (almost everyone bikes or walks in the cities here), Dean Gerard Versluis noted that, inspired by programs like that of St. John’s College in Annapolis, their curriculum includes mathematics and literature. This has caused them difficulties in recruiting students, who are often eager to study philosophy and theology but wonder why they should be required to take courses in subject areas they consider irrelevant. There are many things we can say to explain this, but often the proof is in the pudding. I loved hearing from Femke Heijmans, one of our students, who expressed her amazement at how much she learned from last year’s study of Euclid, but even more at her realization of how much, much more there is to know than she will ever be able to.

The same question came up in one of the several academic retreats I led for teachers this summer. The three-day program of integrated learning includes a session in which participants prepare to publicly present Euclid’s demonstration of how to bisect an angle without using a protractor. In the midst of some energetic discussion to understand the arguments and entertain other ways, one participant raised the question, “But what use is all this?” Some participants excitedly pointed out that they had been enjoying a palpable experience of learning to use reason. I invited them to imagine how vastly different their life would be if they had been trained so that they could habitually reproduce even difficult geometrical demonstrations clearly, orderly, and intelligently.

These are among the profound effects that the Quadrivium has traditionally had on students and continues to have today on liberal arts students fortunate enough to be required to develop their powers of mathematical thinking. The Boethius Institute is in a privileged position to promote the inclusion of the Quadrivium in today’s classical liberal arts renewal, and it will be a primary focus of our efforts in the next few years.

In other news, the Augustine Institute graduate school, home base for Jeff Lehman and myself, moved over the summer to a beautiful new campus in St. Louis. This threw a wrench into our plans to host several events this summer, but will provide outstanding opportunities in the near future. We hope to welcome you there in the future.