Andrew Seeley, Author at Arts of Liberty

January 17, 2025January 17, 2025Bulletin

From the President (January 2024)

“And they’re off!” This is how I am feeling about the new year and the work of the Boethius Institute. 2024 had its trials, but we ended well, and have had a strong beginning to 2025. It began on January 3^rd and 4^th in Pasadena at the Adeodatus Winter forum, which was entitled Canonizing Tolkien. This was not declaring him a Catholic saint, but about making the case that Tolkien has reached the status of a “canonical author” – one respectable enough to be read and studied in a serious way, even one that all educated people should have read thoughtfully. (Boethius Senior Fellow Dr. Erik Ellis explains more about what this means in one of this bulletin’s feature articles.)

I thoroughly enjoyed my time with other serious students of Tolkien’s works, such as Brad Birzer, author of Sanctifying Myth, and Holly Ordway, author of Tolkien’s Modern Reading and Tolkien’s Faith. Boethius Fellows contributed to event: Dr. Ellis explained how Tolkien as scholar “canonized” Beowulf (through his influential article “The Monsters and the Critics”) and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. (Both essays, along with his famous “On Faerie Stories” can be found in this volume.) My talk was entitled Educating for Greatness: The Lord of the Rings as a Cultural Epic, a portion of which is our second feature article. We also include Gimli’s praise of the Glittering Caves of Aglarond from The Lord of the Rings, a moving example of Tolkien’s power, who, like the Elves of Lorien, put the thought of all he loved into all he made.

The new year has also brought the good news of our first major grant. The St. John Henry Newman Institute has committed $100,000 to help us launch our quadrivium project, the goal of which is to help educators understand the importance of the quadrivium formation in liberal education, and to provide the training and resources to make it effective in the classroom. You’ll have more news about this in future bulletins.

We’re also about to begin the final semester with our first cohort of fellows. This semester we will study the principles of music and astronomy as liberal arts, as well as consider the importance of all the liberal arts for a life ordered to wisdom. As a taste of the success of this program, I am delighted to share this account by fellow Lucas dos Santos, who is already sharing the fruits of his study with educators in Brazil.

More is already underway. So stay tuned for more great news about our work this year.

January 17, 2025January 17, 2025Bulletin

Educating for Greatness: The Lord of the Rings as Cultural Epic

From a talk given at the Adeodatus Winter Forum: “Canonizing” Tolkien: The Case for Reading Tolkien at All Levels of Catholic Education

I often recommend that parents and students and donors who want to assess a high school should pay attention to its valedictory addresses, to get a sense of the spirit that motivates its best students. At the best schools, these express a conviction that, in words attributed to Benedict XVI, “We are not made for comfort; we are made for greatness.”

What elicits desires for greatness in our youth? What forms the image of greatness that will shape the efforts of their lives? Jane Forsyth, in her 2007 valedictory address at St. Augustine Academy in Ventura, dwelt on the power of the books they read together in English class.

Our class has always loved English. We have been privileged to read many great works of literature, and our discussions of them have been lively; often they carried on after class. But among all the years of English classes, this last year, especially this last semester, stands apart.

We began the year in much the same vein as past years, reading two works that, though they had little in common with one another, were nonetheless elevating and magnificent: Willa Cather’s Death Comes for the Archbishop and Shakespeare’s Much Ado About Nothing. The second semester was different: we began with All Quiet on the Western Front, an agonizing story of a hopeless young man in the trenches of World War I who dies abandoned and disappointed by those in whom he had put his trust. We next read The Great Gatsby, a tale of decadence, betrayal and disappointment set in the 1920’s whose theme is the illusory and unattainable nature of man’s innate desire for happiness and goodness. This work was followed by Steinbeck’s famous The Grapes of Wrath which, through its twisted use of Biblical allusions and socialist propaganda, challenges Christianity, setting up a system of belief founded on human beings and manifested by a communist ordering of society to merely natural goods.

We were all shaken by these books, so unlike any we had read in our many years at St. Augustine Academy. Their darkness and despair dampened our spirits, and their utter Godlessness was shocking and disturbing. Our souls rebelled against these works; and we realized all at once that everything we had been taught about the nature of man and the goodness of God had taken root within us.

We closed the year with Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited and a peek at Flannery O’Connor’s short stories. These, too, dealt with decadence, ugliness, and sin. But they did not leave us with a bad taste in our mouths. Their steadfast hopefulness contrasted sharply with the despair of the other works we had read. They acknowledged the problems with fallen man and with the world, but then pointed to God as the one who can solve these problems.

These works struck a chord in us, teaching as they did that, to be sure, evil does exist; that a battle is raging between Satan and God; that the battleground is our souls; that the battle is to the death; but that, in spite of all this, we have nothing to fear because Christ is our Great Captain who will win the victory with us. Indeed, He has already won: by His Passion, Death, and Resurrection, He has bought us back from the devil and made grace, that necessary help of God, available to us. And if we open the doors ever so slightly, that grace will flood our souls.

Let me point out what a model their English teacher must have been. If you want to assess your English classes, begin by rating your students on the extent to which they found the books elevating and magnificent, that they were shaken and disturbed, that they found hope in the face of despair. Great literature is not meant to be dissected and left for dead, but to arouse and form our souls. As Arnold Bennett says in Literary Taste: How to Form It, “The makers of literature are those who have seen and felt the miraculous interestingness of the universe.”

But something is missing in Jane’s list. In previous years, she and her classmates would have read many of the great heroic epics of Western literature – The Iliad and The Odyssey, The Aeneid, the Divine Comedy. But where is the great modern heroic epic? Brideshead and O’Connor point to God and grace but do not exemplify for us how to live a life heroically.

In classical times, epics, culture, and education went together. Ancient epics expressed and formed their cultures. Everybody had heard and read them so often that everybody knew them. They could be quoted and referred to without citing them. These cultural epics inspired youth and were a source of wisdom for the learned. The characters and events were an ideal that the young men, especially the leading young men of the time, wanted to live up to. Alexander carried around with him a treasury which included Homer’s Iliad. He saw everything that he did as living up to the glory of Achilles. He carried that with him as he overcame the entire Persian Empire.

Epics not only express and form a culture, but they have traditionally been the focus of formal education. For the Greeks, formal education meant educating into the Iliad and the Odyssey. That was the whole goal. In the Socratic dialogue, Protagoras, Protagoras describes Greek education: “And when the boy has learned his letters and is beginning to understand what is written… they put into his hands the works of great poets, which he reads sitting on a bench at school; in these are contained many admonitions, and many tales, and praises, and encomia of ancient famous men, which he is required to learn by heart, in order that he may imitate or emulate them and desire to become like them.”

Education into these works was considered sufficient education. Not only were you educated into the ideals, the language, and the mastery of the author, but it also prepared you to learn everything else. It provided a framework within which to judge. You had to incorporate everything else you learned into this framework.

The Lord of the Rings is an epic of a similar character and with a similar profundity of impact to the great epics of the tradition. Dr. Tekla Bude, Oregon State Associate Professor of Medieval Literatures, defines an epic as “a long story about a hero that serves as an organizing point of cultural or social identity.” She then identifies four aspects of a cultural epic:

It is about heroes
It involves universal settings
It involves the supernatural
It provides the foundation of a culture.

1. Epics are about heroes. We often call someone “a hero” who, in the moment and outside of their ordinary life, does something heroic, but that doesn’t make them a heroic character. A heroic character is prepared for heroic things and his life is led in expectation of doing these great things.

Heroes are judged by and judge themselves by other standards. Aristotle identifies heroic virtue as a separate category from ordinary virtue. He uses Hector as an example. For an ordinary man to do some of the things that Hector did would be rash, but for him, they were right. Heroes are used to the fact that their peoples depend on them. The heroes know that and accept it.

This doesn’t mean they are all good; when a hero falls, it is a 9.0 earthquake.

“Sing, Goddess, Achilles’ rage,

Black and murderous, that cost the Greeks

Incalculable pain.”

The Lord of the Rings is filled with heroic figures: Gandalf, Elrond, Galadriel, the Council of the Wise, Saruman, Denethor, Faramir, Boromir, and Éowyn. These are all heroic characters who have to deal with and make decisions that we don’t have to face. Aragorn is a great example. He knew from his youth he was meant to be a hero. He had prepared himself for the moment of trial for 70 years. At Parth Galen, when Gandalf had died, Aragorn becomes the leader of the company. The Orcs have crashed in on the Fellowship and taken Merry and Pippin. Frodo and Sam have fled. Boromir is dead. Aragorn says, “Now the company is all in ruin. It is I that have failed. Vain was Gandalf’s trust in me.” It’s almost impossible for us to imagine what a devastating moment that was for Aragorn. He felt that his whole life’s commitment had failed and he was the failure. Yet he went on.

2. Epics have a universal character. In The Lord of the Rings, we experience villages and agricultural land, as well as ancient forests of great danger and yet compelling beauty. We travel through mountains, caves, plains, devastated landscape, deserts, strongholds, and cities of ancient beauty and strength. My ability to picture what he described was very poor, but when I encountered these things in real life, I understood his descriptions, and his descriptions helped me experience them more fully. I recognized some of the devastation before the gates of Morgoth when I drove through the deserts of Utah. I recognized the mountains when I was in the Rocky Mountains for the first time. I recognized mountain strongholds when I visited Assisi, and Bree in rural villages in Iowa.

In The Lord of the Rings, we encounter many different kinds of people. We encounter the Shire, the ordinary folk who have a home they love. We encounter Tom Bombadil, someone who is at home that way but in the natural world. We encounter the Last Homely House of Elrond, where memory and story are central aspects of life. We encounter Lothlórien, the Dream-flower where the past remains present. In Rohan, we find the the great grass swept plains up against the mountains and a people who are accustomed to both the plains and the mountains – the horse people, the semi-barbaric, who live in relationship with a civilized world like the way the Goths related to the Roman world. We encounter Gondor, an ancient civilization always living in relation to its past. We even encounter the Orcs with their very debased and violent way of life.

3. Dr. Bude includes the supernatural as an important part of cultural epics. Christopher Dawson, the great British sociologist of the 20th century, said that religion is the basis of all culture. Tolkien, for various reasons, deliberately avoided explicit religion in The Lord of the Rings. ‘ But encounter with the religious is an important part of the education of the four hobbits. The Shire is without religion. As wonderful as the Shire is, there is nothing that looks beyond life in the Shire. The Travellers learned from the Elves to invoke Elbereth. During several months in Rivendell, the hobbits had heard the stories of the Silmarillion about Ilúvatar and the Valar; these later strengthened Sam and Frodo as they were about to enter Mordor. The Gondorians retained some religious practices, such as bowing to the west before eating. For them, this brought to mind Numenor and Elven home and the Valar who govern the world under the one God, Iluvatar. Frodo felt awkward that the hobbits had no such custom.

Still, for the most part in The Lord of the Rings, the divine is hidden. But it is powerfully at work. Providence is a central theme in the work. We see this especially through Gandalf. Gandalf is a wizard on a mission, literally. He was sent by the Valar to fight Sauron, and he was sent back after his death to finish the job. Central to Gandalf’s heroic wisdom is acute perception of Providence at work. Early in the story, Gandalf speaks to Frodo of how Bilbo came to find the Ring in such an odd circumstance that nobody would have foreseen. He says, “Behind that, there was something else at work, beyond any design of the Ring maker. I can put it no plainer than by saying that Bilbo was meant to find the ring, and not by its maker. In which case you also were meant to have it. And that may be an encouraging thought.” Gandalf is very serious about this. He sees that something incredible, something divinely surprising, has happened. So he doesn’t let Frodo give the Ring to somebody more powerful who could be really responsible for it. He seems to think, “Something has happened I didn’t anticipate. I need to understand its whole purpose. What is the One up to in this?” This is the way Gandalf rolls.

Trust in Providence allows Tolkien’s heroes to exemplify mercy, the chief spiritual virtue of the whole epic. Through the story, we are led to believe that having mercy on those who deserve punishment or death will be rewarded and that we should always in every possible circumstance offer mercy. True, it’s dangerous to be merciful to those who don’t deserve mercy. But Gandalf says Bilbo took so little harm from the Ring because he acted with pity by not killing Gollum. In the end, the Quest would have failed except for Gollum; Gollum would not have been alive if Frodo had not learned the lesson of mercy from Gandalf. Providence and mercy are the heart of the religious aspect of The Lord of the Rings.

4. Finally, an epic provides a foundation for culture by presenting its ideals in a way that shapes culture. I think that, in The Lord of the Rings, Tolkien united and expressed the ideals of Christian civilization in a purer and more heroic way than ever before, as love for the lowly, hope for its ennoblement. The story presents with a clarity of Christian moral vision – mercy, duty, freedom, choice, heart, will, love for the natural, love for the laborer. I also think that we imbibe from him the best spirit of Christendom, including the Greco-Roman, and Norse traditions it united and purified. We are prepared to love and learn from the cultural, theological, philosophical, and historical experiences of the Church that help us understand more deeply the spiritual vision he presents.

5. I will add one aspect of a culture epic to Bude’s list: a cultural epic invites and rewards thought. It is a repository of cultural wisdom. A cultural epic means more to you the older you get. You learn more from it. When you go back as a scholar, you discover more of its treasures. And you reinspired by it. When you go back and read it again as an older person, when you have yourself tried and failed, when have yourself experienced so much more of people and places and things, his works mean so much more to you. I now find it hard to read many passages aloud without crying.

Did Tolkien intend The Lord of the Rings to become a cultural epic? He did see that it would play that role in the Shire. At the end of The Lord of the Rings, Frodo gives the Red Book of the Westmarch to Sam before he goes over the sea. He says to Sam:

You will be the Mayor, of course, as long as you want to be, and the most famous gardener in history; and you will read things out of the Red Book, and keep alive the memory of the age that is gone, so that people will remember the Great Danger, and so love their beloved land all the more. And that will keep you as busy and as happy as anyone can be, as long as your part in the Story goes on.

The Lord of the Rings as written by Bilbo and Frodo, passed on to Sam, becomes the cultural epic of the Shire. It leads them into a new relationship with the kingdom of Arnor and Gondor and ennobles the whole society. From then on, young hobbits would realize, “We are made for greatness.”

November 13, 2024November 13, 2024Bulletin

From the President (November 2024)

Ah! Weather! For 30 years, I raised my family in Southern California. People would say to me in envious admiration, “What beautiful weather you have!” “Actually,” I would reply, “we have no weather, and I think I miss it.”

I’ve got it now. Living in northwest Iowa on the border of Minnesota, we’ve had quite the ride this year. A gorgeous surprise spring in February was followed by a return to winter, then 10 inches of rain leading to record flooding, which all dried up during the long drought of summer. An unseasonably warm October clothed the bean fields with flaming yellow, often surrounding hollows still colored inky green with late planting, while the reaping machines turned the dry cornfields from ochre to harvest gold. October ended with a Halloween snowfall, which I enjoyed watching through our warm bedrooms bay windows – beautiful white flakes blustered about by a fitful wind against a mixed background of still green and bright yellow and bare naked trees, the last reaching their fine bronchial branches up to the luminous gray-white clouds. What will November bring? One thing I know – no matter how harsh the winter, spring will come again.

October 28th witnessed the passing of Eva Brown, for over 60 years a Tutor, and inspiration, and leader of St John’s College in Annapolis, Maryland. I only met her once, at a Circe Institute gala honoring her with The Russell Kirk Paideia Prize, but I owe her a great personal debt. Her institution inspired the founding of Thomas Aquinas College, the dear mother that inflamed and informed my love of learning, and kept me in weatherless SoCal for so long. More personally, she had a profound impact on my mentor, colleague, and friend, Richard Ferrier, in whose spirit of infectious wonder, joy in life, and passionate love of learning I was blessed to bask for countless hours. Whatever I have done in the service of the classical liberal arts renewal we are enjoying has been the fruit of Eva and Richard and the many other exemplary teachers I have had, who labored to keep the flame of learning alive as it fell into winter elsewhere.

We are now into the third or fourth generation of this recovery, and it is beautiful to see many new shoots arising in the United States and around the world. This issue of the Bulletin features more fruit from the Eva tree. David Arias, a student of mine some years ago, is now leading the unique efforts of the Albertus Magnus Institute, while Jean Carlos Guerreiro, another Thomas Aquinas College graduate, has returned to his native country of Brazil to contribute to the recent upsurge of parents and educators planting new classical liberal arts schools there. I look forward to meeting many of those involved in Brazil in May, when I will speak at a conference organized by the Instituto Newman de Educaçao Classica.

Speaking of Brazil, I am excited to announce that Lucas Fonseca Dos Santos, one of our Boethius Fellows and a master of classical languages, is translating many of our Arts of Liberty materials into Portuguese. We are blessed to be able to offer the abundance of these resources to a population eager to receive them. We have already seen the number of website visitors from Brazil jump from dozens to hundreds!

I also had the joy of visiting two schools that have been at the classical renewal long enough to count as established. Immaculata Classical Academy in Louisville and Sacred Heart Academy in Grand Rapids impressed me with the unity of their faculty and their desire for excellence. I was inspired to write a blog account of my visit to the former and to share the fruits of discussing leading Discussion Classes at the latter. I hope that you are blessed to be associated with schools like these, as parents, teachers, alumni, or supporters, and pray that beautiful educating communities like these will continue to spread throughout the world.

September 18, 2024September 18, 2024Bulletin

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.

March 25, 2024March 25, 2024Bulletin

Through the Lenses of Rhetoric: A Classical Look at Lincoln’s Second Inaugural

In 2021, I taught a course on the Trivium for the first time, and have taught it several times since. There is nothing like teaching for learning, and I have learned a great deal as I have taught, especially about rhetoric. I had taught small portions of Aristotle’s Rhetoric before, but remained ignorant of most of it, and I knew almost nothing about later traditions of rhetoric. I still think of myself as merely an advanced beginner in rhetoric rather than a professor of it, but I am becoming an amateur, a lover. Aristotle’s Rhetoric has educated me in the range of the orator’s understanding of the minds and hearts of ordinary people, while the traditional canons of rhetoric, its various figures, and the exercises of progymnasmata have improved my approach to speaking and to analyzing the speeches of others.

Though I have been a passionate as well as professional reader of great texts, I find I am gaining significant insight into and appreciation of historically great speeches. Getting to know the trees in the forest of rhetoric (especially through the Silva Rhetoricae website) has led me to ask certain questions habitually and in an orderly way, helping me get inside the mind of the author. I have learned to think about the occasion and the audience, distinguish appeals to logos and pathos and ethos, understand the flow of a speech and the choices made by its author through the canons of invention and arrangement. I am even beginning to become conversant with the common figures, tropes, and schemes.

It has been a particular joy to gain greater insight into Lincoln’s Second Inaugural Address. I have always loved the speech for its deeply moving conclusion - “With malice toward none with charity for all with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right….” Yet, in spite of having read it many times in my career, even studying it carefully on several occasions, I had still found it a difficult speech to follow. Lincoln seems to wander around from the conspiracies that took place at his first inauguration to slavery, prayer, and the Almighty, before his culminating exhortation “to bind up the nation's wounds, to care for him who shall have borne the battle and for his widow and his orphan….” But looking at it through the lenses of classical rhetorical techniques helped bring his order into focus for me.

The most general and encompassing ideas in classical rhetoric are those of Kairos and audience. The first, connected to the occasion giving rise to the speech, leads us to ask what sort of speech would seem appropriate to the formal occasion, as well as what opportunities it offers to the speaker for taking on larger issues. The second makes us ask what is the character and disposition of the audience he is facing? Is he addressing multiple audiences? What difficulties might they present for effective communication? How should he overcome them?

Referring to the formal occasion is often a great introduction, and allows the speaker to let his audience know what he wants to talk about. Lincoln’s first paragraph distinguishes the occasion of this inauguration from that of his first inaugural address; the first demanded a detailed account of how he intended to proceed in a time of crisis, but this does not. He does not tell them what he thinks this occasion really demands. However, he puts aside what his immediate audience might expect - that he would lead them in anticipatory celebrations of imminent triumph - with a gentle understatement: “The progress of our arms…is I trust reasonably satisfactory.” His audience is left wondering what can he say that will be timely now, what does he think they need to hear? Readers of the speech can tell from the conclusion that he wants to bring them to a place where they will put aside all malice and embrace charity for all, even for Southerners. We can imagine how unwelcome that might be.
Arrangement is another central rhetorical consideration. How has the speaker structured his speech? What are its constituent parts, and how does each contribute to his central point? Lincoln uses two structural techniques, the more obvious of which is parallelism. In the second paragraph Lincoln initiates a comparison between the two sides in the war that extends through the rest of the speech.

All dreaded it ~ all sought to avert it. While the inaugural address was being delivered from this place devoted altogether to saving the Union without war, insurgent agents were in the city seeking to destroy it without war ~ seeking to dissolve the Union and divide effects by negotiation. Both parties deprecated war but one of them would make war rather than let the nation survive, and the other would accept war rather than let it perish. And the war came.

Parallel sentence structure creates antithesis, which highlights their different purposes: to save the union without war, to destroy it without war; make war rather than let the nation survive; accept war rather than let it perish. But he speaks of their areas of agreement as well as disagreement. They agreed in dreading war. Each recognized that if it had not been for the existence of slaves, there would have been no war. They each expected the war to be over quickly; neither expected the war would bring slavery to an end. Each prayed that God would aid them against the other.

While parallelism is woven throughout the main body of the speech, the speech naturally divides into two sections according to a classical distinction particularly appropriate to a courtroom. First comes a statement of straightforward facts about a dispute (narratio), then comes the proof that establishes the speaker’s main point (confirmatio). The facts should be relatively uncontroversial, yet presented so as to prepare the ground for the controversial argument.

Lincoln presents the facts in a strikingly impersonal way. He does not speak in terms of “we” and “they,” but simply of one side and the other. Lincoln chooses to use the word “party” instead of side, as though bidding the audience to look at the dispute from the impartial standpoint of a judge, one who has seen many disputes in his days, and knows that there is usually plenty of blame to go around.

The second paragraph ends briefly, impersonally, soberly. And the war came. There is no human subject for that sentence, as though the war came on its own, inevitably, apart from any human decision. This ending naturally leads to a question, not “Who started the war? Which side is to blame?” but “How did the war come?” The existence of slaves was, somehow, the cause of the war. The commas in the text no doubt reflect a pause on “somehow”, helping the audience hear that the implicit question has only been vaguely answered. Although other issues were involved, all knew that in some way the war came because the two parties had different intentions with regard to slaves.

As Lincoln begins to move into the hard part, where he must bring his audience to conclusions they might not like, he brings in prayer, the Bible, and God. He references four different Scripture passages in seven sentences. He places his hope to persuade his audience on authority, the highest authority, the most powerful authority in the Union.

He begins by implying a question. No one expected the war to be so big, nor for slavery to cease before the war ended. Each looked for an easier triumph and a result less fundamental and astounding. Both sides prayed that God would be on their side; the magnitude of the war made evident that He was not fully on either side. In another brief, undecorated but powerful sentence, Lincoln expresses the key turn in thought he wishes his audience to have: The Almighty has his own purposes. Those who believe in a providential God must expect that they are not the primary agents in so great an event. The question becomes, not what did each party intend, but what did the Almighty intend?

Lincoln, with the rest of the North, can understand why God would not be on the side of those who prayed that slavery would be extended. Lincoln adapts the language of Genesis 3:19 to suggest the hypocrisy of Christian slave owners: It may seem strange that any should dare to ask a just God's assistance in wringing their bread from the sweat of other men's faces…. Yet he immediately invokes Matthew 7 so his audience can hear the warning of Jesus against indulging in such sentiments: “Let us judge not that we be not judged.”

The implicit heartfelt question of the Northern party is, “Why has He not been entirely on our side? Aren’t we the just ones in this dispute? Why have we suffered so much bloodshed and devastation?” Lincoln uses a hypothetical statement to respectfully suggest a providential purpose for the war: God is using it as a scourge to punish those responsible for the evils of slavery. He offers evidence from a Scriptural text: Woe to that man by whom the offenses come. By whom did the offense come? Lincoln must make his audience face the hard truth that both parties share in the guilt of slavery. Though at the beginning of the war, slaves were localized in the South, it had not been so from the beginning of America. …He gives to both North and South this terrible war as the woe due to those by whom the offense came. He names it now, not “Southern slavery”, but “American slavery”, which for 250 years, from the earliest days of the colonies, had brought wealth to the owners and unjust suffering to the slaves. He therefore bids his Christian audience, not to triumph as the just, but to follow Scripture in praising the Lord as they accept His scourge: “...As was said three thousand years ago, so still it must be said, the judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether.

Lincoln educated himself to be a master orator through textbooks and Euclid and Shakespeare and years of advocacy and debate. In this speech, we admire how, having laid the groundwork for his argument with lawyerly objectivity, he brings it home with the forcefulness of a revival preacher, a style that befits an American statesman (as does its brevity), preparing his audience, chastened in both mind and heart, to receive his gentle invitation to embrace a Christian attitude towards the suffering of friend and enemy alike:

With malice toward none with charity for all with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right let us strive on to finish the work we are in to bind up the nation's wounds, to care for him who shall have borne the battle and for his widow and his orphan ~ to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations.

March 25, 2024Bulletin

From the Director

Dear Reader,

Over 25 years into the classical liberal arts revival, we are launching into a period of accelerated growth. My sense of this has been confirmed by recent participation in the Transforming Culture Symposium at Benedictine College in Kansas, and an Alcuin Retreat for classical education leaders at the University of Virginia on the theme of “The Academic Return of the Great Tradition.” Mainstream education today is looking worse and worse, while veterans in the movement have founded institutions that are now very good at offering parents, educators, administrators, pastors, and social leaders the aid they need to build or re-build school communities with a high rate of success.

Recently I was asked, “If classical education were to increase tenfold, what would the future look like in two generations?” “Who knows?” is the truest answer. The present is so uncertain; we stand in real danger of losing the freedom and social stability necessary for education. Still, it’s interesting to muse. “Classical education” means different things to different people; those who have been involved in the renewal for some years are now trying to sort through these different ideas. If we take it to refer generally to a serious education grounded in the best of Western cultural traditions and ordered to the true, good, and beautiful, today’s growth gives hope of great fruit in fifty years. The demand is certainly there, and growing; if we can meet it while providing all the necessary teacher formation, which is the most important part of the work, and avoiding the teacher and student burnout that can afflict networks that grow too quickly, then we would be graduating several hundred thousand each year, between 5% and 10% of the total high school graduates. In 30 years or 40 years perhaps 10 million adults will have been nurtured in serious, often joyful, learning communities, with a high rate of alumni devotion. They will be grounded talented well-formed people, a good chunk of whom will have significant life experience under their belt. And that’s only in the United States. Many around the world are seeing what is happening in the US, and doing all they can to begin movements in their countries.

Is that a critical mass large enough to topple the hollowed out husks of the educational and cultural institutions already showing signs of eventual collapse by providing real, workable, worthwhile alternatives? At least it should be enough to pass on in a beautiful way the best of Christian Western civilization in the midst of general cultural collapse. Maybe, it will even bring about in some form a new birth of wisdom, which we so desperately need. We need our knowledge of the truth to blossom into wisdom, we need our preservation of the beautiful to create profundity, we need our love of the good to produce statesmen.

Our society is plagued by a lack of wisdom; the modern era was grounded on a complete rejection of the possibility and desirability of wisdom. We need wise educators, creators, and leaders to inspire us, persuade us, instruct us, and show us the way. The larger the number of those well-educated, the more likely we are to produce these great people, especially as we foster those special souls who give themselves over to the pursuit of wisdom with a passionate life intensity, and as we develop a greater diversity of thoughts and practices among those who love those things and are able to argue about them, for in a real way wisdom is born of deep and serious questions.

In this edition of our bulletin, we can see the fruits of Abraham Lincoln’s education in serious grammar study and reading Shakespeare, the King James Bible, Euclid, and Blackstone, as we mine the deep spiritual wisdom expressed beautifully and powerfully in his Second Inaugural Address. Boethius Fellow Joseph Tabenkin shows how his openness to art allowed a powerful sculpture to fulfill his experience of Normandy Beach.

February 1, 2024February 1, 2024Bulletin

From the Director

Dear Reader,

This issue of the Arts of Liberty Bulletin features different pieces related to literature, and arises from a number of providential connections. I encountered Arnold Bennett’s 1907 Literary Taste and How to Form It through my collaboration with Lisa Vandamme’s Read With Me project. We led a series of conversations on the short, practical, challenging, inspiring guide which I found very fruitful. Here is a teaser: The makers of literature are those who have seen and felt the miraculous interestingness of the universe. A “chance-meeting” at last year’s National Symposium for Classical Education introduced me to Megan Lindsay, a Great Hearts’ drama and literature teacher who shared with me some of her secrets for opening the minds and hearts of her students to the power of Shakespeare (which I adapted for a very successful workshop at an elementary school in Kentucky). I celebrated Providence in the works of JRR Tolkien and the classical liberal arts revival in my talk at last year’s Circe Institute conference.

The new year has seen our work at the Boethius Institute continue to develop. Our Fellows in formation just completed a short course on logic by considering the ways in which it helps perfect our reasoning even in matters where we can’t attain the mathematical certainty, and encountering Aristotle’s description of the magical moment of intellectual insight that elevates us above the limited but powerful realm of sensory experience. We will now turn to look at classical rhetoric in theory and practice. Senior Fellow Erik Ellis discussed criteria for a canon of great books with colleagues in South America. Matthew Walz gave a talk on Benedict XVI’s concern for healing reason at the Circe Institute’s Forma Symposium. Jeffrey Lehman and I offered talks on the liberal arts and the history of Catholic education at the St. John Bosco Conference in Denver, and soon we will begin our modern mathematics sequence with our students at the Pascal Institute in the Netherlands.

Many more seeds are germinating to bear fruit in the summer and beyond. I look forward to reporting on them for our next Bulletin.

February 1, 2024Bulletin

Literary Taste: How to Form It

Chapter 1 The Aim of Literary Taste: How to Form It by Arthur Bennet

At the beginning a misconception must be removed from the path. Many people, if not most, look on literary taste as an elegant accomplishment, by acquiring which they will complete themselves, and make themselves finally fit as members of a correct society. They are secretly ashamed of their ignorance of literature, in the same way as they would be ashamed of their ignorance of etiquette at a high entertainment, or of their inability to ride a horse if suddenly called upon to do so. There are certain things that a man ought to know, or to know about, and literature is one of them: such is their idea. They have learnt to dress themselves with propriety, and to behave with propriety on all occasions; they are fairly "up" in the questions of the day; by industry and enterprise they are succeeding in their vocations; it behoves them, then, not to forget that an acquaintance with literature is an indispensable part of a self-respecting man's personal baggage. Painting doesn't matter; music doesn't matter very much. But "everyone is supposed to know" about literature. Then, literature is such a charming distraction! Literary taste thus serves two purposes: as a certificate of correct culture and as a private pastime. A young professor of mathematics, immense at mathematics and games, dangerous at chess, capable of Haydn on the violin, once said to me, after listening to some chat on books, "Yes, I must take up literature." As though saying: "I was rather forgetting literature. However, I've polished off all these other things. I'll have a shy at literature now."

This attitude, or any attitude which resembles it, is wrong. To him who really comprehends what literature is, and what the function of literature is, this attitude is simply ludicrous. It is also fatal to the formation of literary taste. People who regard literary taste simply as an accomplishment, and literature simply as a distraction, will never truly succeed either in acquiring the accomplishment or in using it half-acquired as a distraction; though the one is the most perfect of distractions, and though the other is unsurpassed by any other accomplishment in elegance or in power to impress the universal snobbery of civilised mankind. Literature, instead of being an accessory, is the fundamental sine qua non of complete living. I am extremely anxious to avoid rhetorical exaggerations. I do not think I am guilty of one in asserting that he who has not been "presented to the freedom" of literature has not wakened up out of his prenatal sleep. He is merely not born. He can't see; he can't hear; he can't feel, in any full sense. He can only eat his dinner. What more than anything else annoys people who know the true function of literature, and have profited thereby, is the spectacle of so many thousands of individuals going about under the delusion that they are alive, when, as a fact, they are no nearer being alive than a bear in winter.

I will tell you what literature is! No—I only wish I could. But I can't. No one can. Gleams can be thrown on the secret, inklings given, but no more. I will try to give you an inkling. And, to do so, I will take you back into your own history, or forward into it. That evening when you went for a walk with your faithful friend, the friend from whom you hid nothing— or almost nothing...! You were, in truth, somewhat inclined to hide from him the particular matter which monopolised your mind that evening, but somehow you contrived to get on to it, drawn by an overpowering fascination. And as your faithful friend was sympathetic and discreet, and flattered you by a respectful curiosity, you proceeded further and further into the said matter, growing more and more confidential, until at last you cried out, in a terrific whisper: "My boy, she is simply miraculous!" At that moment you were in the domain of literature.

Let me explain. Of course, in the ordinary acceptation of the word, she was not miraculous. Your faithful friend had never noticed that she was miraculous, nor had about forty thousand other fairly keen observers. She was just a girl. Troy had not been burnt for her. A girl cannot be called a miracle. If a girl is to be called a miracle, then you might call pretty nearly anything a miracle.... That is just it: you might. You can. You ought. Amid all the miracles of the universe you had just wakened up to one. You were full of your discovery. You were under a divine impulsion to impart that discovery. You had a strong sense of the marvellous beauty of something, and you had to share it. You were in a passion about something, and you had to vent yourself on somebody. You were drawn towards the whole of the rest of the human race. Mark the effect of your mood and utterance on your faithful friend. He knew that she was not a miracle. No other person could have made him believe that she was a miracle. But you, by the force and sincerity of your own vision of her, and by the fervour of your desire to make him participate in your vision, did for quite a long time cause him to feel that he had been blind to the miracle of that girl.

You were producing literature. You were alive. Your eyes were unlidded, your ears were unstopped, to some part of the beauty and the strangeness of the world; and a strong instinct within you forced you to tell someone. It was not enough for you that you saw and heard. Others had to see and hear. Others had to be wakened up. And they were! It is quite possible—I am not quite sure— that your faithful friend the very next day, or the next month, looked at some other girl, and suddenly saw that she, too, was miraculous! The influence of literature!

The makers of literature are those who have seen and felt the miraculous interestingness of the universe. And the greatest makers of literature are those whose vision has been the widest, and whose feeling has been the most intense. Your own fragment of insight was accidental, and perhaps temporary. Their lives are one long ecstasy of denying that the world is a dull place. Is it nothing to you to learn to understand that the world is not a dull place? Is it nothing to you to be led out of the tunnel on to the hill-side, to have all your senses quickened, to be invigorated by the true savour of life, to feel your heart beating under that correct necktie of yours? These makers of literature render you their equals.

The aim of literary study is not to amuse the hours of leisure; it is to awake oneself, it is to be alive, to intensify one's capacity for pleasure, for sympathy, and for comprehension. It is not to affect one hour, but twenty-four hours. It is to change utterly one's relations with the world. An understanding appreciation of literature means an understanding appreciation of the world, and it means nothing else. Not isolated and unconnected parts of life, but all of life, brought together and correlated in a synthetic map! The spirit of literature is unifying; it joins the candle and the star, and by the magic of an image shows that the beauty of the greater is in the less. And, not content with the disclosure of beauty and the bringing together of all things whatever within its focus, it enforces a moral wisdom by the tracing everywhere of cause and effect. It consoles doubly— by the revelation of unsuspected loveliness, and by the proof that our lot is the common lot. It is the supreme cry of the discoverer, offering sympathy and asking for it in a single gesture. In attending a University Extension Lecture on the sources of Shakespeare's plots, or in studying the researches of George Saintsbury into the origins of English prosody, or in weighing the evidence for and against the assertion that Rousseau was a scoundrel, one is apt to forget what literature really is and is for. It is well to remind ourselves that literature is first and last a means of life, and that the enterprise of forming one's literary taste is an enterprise of learning how best to use this means of life. People who don't want to live, people who would sooner hibernate than feel intensely, will be wise to eschew literature. They had better, to quote from the finest passage in a fine poem, "sit around and eat blackberries." The sight of a "common bush afire with God" might upset their nerves.

February 1, 2024February 1, 2024Bulletin

Providence and The Lord of the Rings

This article is adapted from Dr. Seeley’s Russell Kirk Paideia Prize acceptance speech at the Circe Institute Conference last July.

Providence is often difficult to see, especially in the present, especially in the midst of great evils, especially for those fighting what JRR Tolkien called “the long defeat.” In similar times, Boethius needed consolation: his major complaint as he sat in prison facing death was that it seemed that the Lord who ruled the heavens and the earth did not rule in the affairs of men.

For me it has not been so difficult to believe. Even before I had faith in the Almighty, I received daily consolation of heart and imagination from The Lord of the Rings. The Lord of the Rings and The Silmarillion were for me what the Iliad and the Odyssey were for the Greeks, what the Scriptures were for the medieval monks. As a teenager, I read The Lord of the Rings continually, to the extent that I had it practically memorized. I judged my life by its characters – Would Sam and Gandalf and Aragorn be friends with me? In their eyes, I wouldn’t look so pretty, which led me to conviction, contrition, prayer, and eventually mercy. Over the years, its words and scenes have come spontaneously to my mind to help me interpret the living world around me.

I have found over the years that I am not alone, I am not the only one who could say he was saved in part by reading Tolkien. It is hard to overestimate the influence of this work on those who have spawned the Christian classical renewal. It is easy to underestimate the wisdom and the art and the thought about art contained in Tolkien’s works.

The Lord of the Rings is a song of merciful Providence. The wise in its stories are models of leaders who use all their wit to follow the guidance of Providence. Gandalf, when speaking of the crazy fact that the Ring was found by Bilbo of the Shire, told Frodo, “Behind that there was something else at work, beyond any design of the ringmaker. I can put it in no plainer than by saying that Bilbo was meant to find the Ring, and not by its maker, in which case you were also meant to have it. And that may be an encouraging thought.” “It is not,” said Frodo.

I have witnessed great things. Beth Sullivan and I were reminiscing about the crazy things that the Lord has accomplished through us nobodies. Ten years ago, we organized our first conference of Catholic classical schools. 72 people participated. Ten years later, over 400 will participate next week in our National Conference, with a waiting list and a large live-streaming contingent. I estimate there are over 300 schools that share similar visions of education. Greater things are to come. We have formed a network of over 50 diocesan superintendents representing a quarter of all the dioceses in the country.

I am sure many of you have similar stories to tell! It is not easy, following Providence, though it can be exciting. How many of you have thought like Frodo: 'I am not made for perilous quests. I wish I had never seen the Ring! Why was I chosen?' 'Such questions cannot be answered,' said Gandalf. 'You may be sure that it was not for any merit that others do not possess: not for power or wisdom, at any rate. But you have been chosen, and you must therefore use such strength and heart and wits as you have.'

With Gandalf's help, Frodo determined that he had to leave the Shire; with Elrond's counsel he determined that he was meant to undertake the Quest to destroy the Ring. How ridiculous that a halfling should be chosen for something so important. Who was he? What did he know? He was no hero, not one of the Wise. But he accepted it, with deep reluctance:

A great dread fell on him, as if he was awaiting the pronouncement of some doom that he had long foreseen and vainly hoped might after all never be spoken. An overwhelming longing to rest and remain at peace by Bilbo's side in Rivendell filled all his heart. At last with an effort he spoke, and wondered to hear his own words, as if some other will was using his small voice. ’I will take the Ring,' he said, `though I do not know the way.'

How many of us have felt this way? “Small hands do them because they must.” My wife, Lisa, and I never expected to do anything great. In Thomas Aquinas College and the community that grew up around it – faith-filled, family-centered, fun and talented – we had our Shire. Our greatest aspiration was to be boring. Great enterprises were for different folks. To try to change the downward spiral of Church and society was for the wiser and stronger. But I came to think I heard the call of the Lord, that the Church wanted me to share my experience of beautiful Catholic education. After discussion, prayer, reflection and consultation, we chose to respond, though we did not know the way.

Every trip filled me with dread; often I wondered why I was flying to this place or that. Like Frodo, I wished someone wiser and stronger would take the burden; I would have been happy to help them. But it was not without its rewards. Elrond foretold to Frodo, “You may find friends upon your way when you least look for it.” Andrew Pudewa, Andrew Kern, Brian Phillips, Martin Cothran, Chris and Christine Perrin were among the early friends. Their generous encouragement, advice, and help at a time when ICLE was just a cell phone in my pocket were gifts from God. Companions had been prepared for me, though neither they nor I knew it – Beth, Mary Pat Donoghue (now Secretary of Education for the national Bishops Conference), Chris Weir, Colleen Richards, and more.

“Posterity shall serve Him. Men shall tell of the Lord to the coming generation, and proclaim his deliverance to a people yet unborn, that He has wrought it.” We must share the stories of our adventures in the Lord with the younger generation. For better or worse, we are now for them the Wise and the Great. They will live, as the Chinese curse says, “in interesting times”. Even ordinary life is requiring more and more heroism: fidelity to our Lord, raising our children well, fulfilling our duties, serving our communities. We must encourage them to maintain in the midst of this the spirit of Abraham. When God called him every few decades, Abraham always answered, “Here I am,” in our idiom, “Ready!” We must prepare them to see that difficulties, problems, oppositions, even disasters are not in themselves signs to turn back.

We must also help our children to appreciate their unique gifts as Americans. It is hard to overestimate the importance of Americans for the Christian classical renewal. It is easy to underestimate the goodness found in the American regime. It is no accident that the renewal of liberal education has begun, is flourishing, and becoming ever more fruitful in America. We are particularly suited to actively undertake great things for the Lord. We are a free people – free in our laws, our institutions, our customs, our traditions, our spirit. Our heroes are those who, though small and insignificant in their origins, undertook great challenges and made great sacrifices to bring something great into the world that had never been before. Our forefathers did not want to rebel, but they cherished freedom with a manly spirit and did what they judged God called them to do: “with a firm reliance on the protection of divine Providence, we mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes and our sacred Honor.” Our liberty is a great gift from the Lord and from them. John Adams said to us, “Posterity! you will never know how much it cost the present generation to preserve your freedom! I hope you will make a good use of it.” Let us never disappoint him.

“We're in the same tale still! It's going on. Don't the great tales never end?” Sam came to this realization in the cleft of Cirith Ungol. We are in the same tale as the Psalmist, as the Church, as America, even, essentially, as Sam. It has been a great tale so far. But it is all too likely that some young ones in the future will say at this point: "Shut the book now, dad; we don't want to read any more." But I will latch on to Andrew Kern’s optimism, and hope that the end, at least for our children, will be: And they lived happily ever after till the end of their days. It is a good ending, and none the worse for having been used before.

We should always be open to the extraordinary.. Often tell God, “I am open to your will.” If you begin to suspect that God is calling you to something crazy, no need to rush. Open yourself to the idea in prayer, asking God to help you know His will. Think it through. Take counsel with those close to you, especially those who seem spiritually wise, and those who will be most affected. Pay attention to weird signs – they shouldn't lead you in the discernment, but they do confirm, or encourage you to keep discerning. Try to stay as peaceful as possible through the whole thing – agitation is often a bad sign.

Once you decide as well as you can that God is asking something of you, or you begin to want to do it yourself, trust Him that, if you begin, He will bless you and others through you. Ask Him to tell you “No” if you aren't supposed to do it. This can be difficult, because we know that difficulties, problems, oppositions are often not signs that you are supposed to drop it. Often disasters are God's way of saying, “I wanted you to attempt this, but that was to prepare you for something else.” Boethius thought his gift to the world was to translate the works of Plato and Aristotle into Latin and show how they were in fundamental agreement. A noble enterprise! But then he was imprisoned, and eventually martyred. Yet he gifted the West with his Consolation of Philosophy, which had a more profound effect. Above all, remember that in difficulties, when God's will seems completely hidden, Wait! He is always at work, and will reveal His will in time.

To you I lift up my eyes,

O you who are enthroned in the heavens!

2 As the eyes of servants

look to the hand of their master,

as the eyes of a maid

to the hand of her mistress,

so our eyes look to the Lord our God,

until he has mercy upon us.

February 1, 2024February 1, 2024Bulletin

Teaching Shakespeare to the Young: An Interview with Megan Lindsay

I enjoy attending conferences, especially when I have no responsibilities, and am just free to attend talks of interest, reconnect with old friends, and make new ones. At last year’s National Classical Education Symposium in Phoenix, I was free to feed my passion for Shakespearian drama by attending 3 workshops by Globe director/actor/teacher, Nicholas Hutchison. They were wonderful, but I came away more excited to have made the acquaintance of Megan Lindsay, a drama instructor and director at Cicero Preparatory Academy, who introduced all three sessions. I discovered that we shared not only a common love of Shakespeare but also a conviction of the formative effects that performing his works can have on the young.

Like many involved in the liberal arts renewal, Megan stumbled into involvement because of her kids. She visited her child’s third grade classroom at a classical Christian school, where they were being taught Shakespeare as a grammar stage activity in connection with Renaissance history. Megan had loved acting when she was young so much that she wanted to study acting in college. (“My parents said, ‘No. That has no future.’ So I studied philosophy and history to spite them!”)

Megan was deeply disturbed by what she saw. The teacher seemed to have no idea how to teach Shakespeare to the young. It was obvious that the kids had no idea what Shakespeare was saying. They had no idea the drama was about real people. “I am the kind who raises their hand to solve a problem before I think it out. I asked the school whether I could stage Shakespeare scenes to show parents? ‘Ok, on your own time.’ As I left I gasped to myself, ‘What did I just do?!”

Megan didn’t really know what kids that young could do. But she thought, ‘I’ll throw spaghetti on the wall and see what sticks.” She started with some scenes that she thought could be really fun for the kids – the witches’ cauldron scene from Macbeth, and the scene featuring the drunken sailors and the monster, Caliban, from The Tempest. It was daring – imagine third graders at a Christian school playing as witches and drunkards. But the kids had a great time!

She decided to begin by having them just experience Shakespeare’s language. She had them say the words in different ways, playing with their sounds. “‘Double, double’ is full of assonance and big vowels. They enjoyed saying the words though they didn’t know what a lot of them meant. As I watched them, I realized how natural this approach is for kids – they are used to learning from listening to adults although much of the vocabulary is beyond them.”

Then she had them act out the scene according to the way the words sounded to them and what they could get of the words. She supplied meanings for a few of the words, but for the most part she let them develop the story without direction from her. “They discovered the story! This was so freeing for me as a teacher. I discovered that my role was less to tell them the meaning than to help them discover that meaning through acting it out.”

Megan also saw how they began to learn about themselves through the process of discovering the story through Shakespeare’s words. “Caliban the monster was played by a lovely little boy. He struggled to understand Caliban’s anger, he couldn’t feel it himself. I asked him, ‘Do you ever feel your parents are unfair? Like some time when your mom said no to you?’ ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘when I really wanted the gum in her purse.” ‘Did you take it?’ ‘Yes.’ ‘How did you feel?’ ‘Guilty, but I was still mad at her for being unfair!’ ‘That’s how Caliban felt,” I said. Mowing the lawn when he thought his brother should have done it helped him connect with Caliban who had to carry logs. I never told him, but I was teaching him the acting technique of substitution.”

She has applied this technique to learning Shakespeare and to many other kinds of literature. Sound it out, act it out, then add meaning. This works, she believes because it is so natural. “Kids come to language in a pre-rational way. Language lies in the human heart. It is our way of making meaning.”

Megan also has found that acting contributes to forming what Vigen Guroian has called the moral imagination, and so influences how they live their lives. Through acting, students discover that thoughts (The True) carry emotions (The Beautiful), which make us want to act (The Good). Likewise with the false, the ugly, and the bad. She once heard a Junior who had played Macbeth trying to help his little sister, who was struggling with playing a giddy girl in another play. “‘We struggle,’ he said, ‘with characters because we are judging them; we are not seeing things as they would see them. I had to understand Macbeth’s pride. And I realized that I am like him.’”

It takes time for an actor to experience his character as real. “New actors have to begin with external representation, until the performance starts to come from within and feel more authentic.” As a director, Megan conveys to her actors that they have a responsibility to the characters they are creating. “You must be true to your character, who is just words until you incarnate him. If you portray him truthfully, he will become real. And this might affect your life.”

Megan experienced this herself recently while playing a narcissistic controlling mom. “Classical education allowed me to enter into her while still maintaining separation. I made her so real that audience members said afterwards, ‘I hate you.’ Then I went backstage, and took the whole mask off. Yet this woman has influenced me. I was humbled, I could see the beginnings of her character in myself. I became more sensitive to conflicts with my daughters as they went off to college, less willing to sweep things under the carpet, even with my husband.”

Megan fosters this experience with her students by having them, after a performance, articulate what they learned. “They will go into life knowing many kinds of people. And they will have been trained in the art of moral imagination.”

Megan has adapted this technique for Shakespeare works for all literature. She tried it with the chapter, “Shelob’s Lair,” from The Lord of the Rings.” She read it herself, and put together a list of great quotations. She then noticed patterns. “In this chapter, Tolkien focuses on the sensible. He highlights the loss of all the senses except smell, which is heightened. He chooses gross words like ‘foul’ and ‘reek’. Darkness becomes a thing destroying all senses, and even the memory of sensations. This is a great description: ‘a shadow that being cast by no light, no light could dissipate.’” She wrote out the best quotations and put them up around the room. As with Shakespeare, she had her students read them, say them, and act them out, even if they didn’t yet understand. Then they talked about them, starting generally with, “What did you notice?” eventually moving to “What is darkness? Is it fitting to portray darkness as evil? Why is it Sam who remembers the light, not Frodo?”

Megan was extraordinarily generous with her time and her resources. Her advice helped me have one of the most delightful experiences of my professional career – a two-day Shakespeare workshop with elementary students. The success of today’s classical education movement comes from having aroused thoughtful, passionate, generous teachers like Megan.