Author: Andrew Seeley

Bulletin

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?!”

File:Macbeth consults the three witches; an apparition appears of Wellcome V0025890.jpgMegan 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.”

A giant spider

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.

Bulletin

Einstein’s Imagination

Excerpt from Relativity: The Special and General Theories by Albert Einstein.

Part of Einstein’s genius was his ability to think things through using just his imagination. In this excerpt, Einstein shows how imagining an elevator accelerating in empty space led him to posit that gravity can be understood as a relative phenomenon. 

In contrast to electric and magnetic fields, the gravitational field exhibits a most remarkable property, which is of fundamental importance for what follows. Bodies which are moving under the sole influence of a gravitational field receive an acceleration, which does not in the least depend either on the material or on the physical state of the body. For instance, a piece of lead and a piece of wood fall in exactly the same manner in a gravitational field (in vacuo), when they start off from rest or with the same initial velocity…We then have the following law: The gravitational mass of a body is equal to its inertial mass.

It is true that this important law had hitherto been recorded in mechanics, but it had not been interpreted. A satisfactory interpretation can be obtained only if we recognize the following fact: The same quality of a body manifests itself according to circumstances as “inertia” or as “weight” (lit. “heaviness”). In the following section we shall show to what extent this is actually the case, and how this question is connected with the general postulate of relativity.

WE imagine a large portion of empty space, so far removed from stars and other appreciable masses that we have before us approximately the conditions required by the fundamental law of Galilei. It is then possible to choose a Galileian reference-body for this part of space (world), relative to which points at rest remain at rest and points in motion continue permanently in uniform rectilinear motion. As reference-body let us imagine a spacious chest resembling a room with an observer inside who is equipped with apparatus. Gravitation naturally does not exist for this observer. He must fasten himself with strings to the floor, otherwise the slightest impact against the floor will cause him to rise slowly towards the ceiling of the room.

To the middle of the lid of the chest is fixed externally a hook with rope attached, and now a “being” (what kind of a being is immaterial to us) begins pulling at this with a constant force. The chest together with the observer then begin to move “upwards” with a uniformly accelerated motion. In course of time their velocity will reach unheard-of values—provided that we are viewing all this from another reference-body which is not being pulled with a rope. But how does the man in the chest regard the process? The acceleration of the chest will be transmitted to him by the reaction of the floor of the chest. He must therefore take up this pressure by means of his legs if he does not wish to be laid out full length on the floor. He is then standing in the chest in exactly the same way as anyone stands in a room of a house on our earth. If he release a body which he previously had in his hand, the acceleration of the chest will no longer be transmitted to this body, and for this reason the body will approach the floor of the chest with an accelerated relative motion. The observer will further convince himself that the acceleration of the body towards the floor of the chest is always of the same magnitude, whatever kind of body he may happen to use for the experiment.

Relying on his knowledge of the gravitational field (as it was discussed in the preceding section), the man in the chest will thus come to the conclusion that he and the chest are in a gravitational field which is constant with regard to time. Of course he will be puzzled for a moment as to why the chest does not fall in this gravitational field. Just then, however, he discovers the hook in the middle of the lid of the chest and the rope which is attached to it, and he consequently comes to the conclusion that the chest is suspended at rest in the gravitational field.

Ought we to smile at the man and say that he errs in his conclusion? I do not believe we ought if we wish to remain consistent; we must rather admit that his mode of grasping the situation violates neither reason nor known mechanical laws. Even though it is being accelerated with respect to the “Galileian space” first considered, we can nevertheless regard the chest as being at rest. We have thus good grounds for extending the principle of relativity to include bodies of reference which are accelerated with respect to each other, and as a result we have gained a powerful argument for a generalised postulate of relativity.

We must note carefully that the possibility of this mode of interpretation rests on the fundamental property of the gravitational field of giving all bodies the same acceleration, or, what comes to the same thing, on the law of the equality of inertial and gravitational mass. If this natural law did not exist, the man in the accelerated chest would not be able to interpret the behavior of the bodies around him on the supposition of a gravitational field, and he would not be justified on the grounds of experience in supposing his reference-body to be “at rest."

Suppose that the man in the chest fixes a rope to the inner side of the lid, and that he attaches a body to the free end of the rope. The result of his will be to stretch the rope so that it will hang “vertically” downwards. If we ask for an opinion of the cause of tension in the rope, the man in the chest will say: “The suspended body experiences a downward force in the gravitational field, and this is neutralized by the tension of the rope; what determines the magnitude of the tension of the rope is the gravitational mass of the suspended body.” On the other hand, an observer who is poised freely in space will interpret the condition of things thus: “The rope must perforce take part in the accelerated motion of the chest, and it transmits this motion to the body attached to it. The tension of the rope is just large enough to effect the acceleration of the body. That which determines the magnitude of the tension of the rope is the inertial mass of the body.” Guided by this example, we see that our extension of the principle of relativity implies the necessity of the law of the equality of inertial and gravitational mass. Thus we have obtained a physical interpretation of this law.

From our consideration of the accelerated chest we see that a general theory of relativity must yield important results on the laws of gravitation. In point of fact, the systematic pursuit of the general idea of relativity has supplied the laws satisfied by the gravitational field. Before proceeding farther, however, I must warn the reader against a misconception suggested by these considerations. A gravitational field exists for the man in the chest, despite the fact that there was no such field for the co-ordinate system first chosen.

Now we might easily suppose that the existence of a gravitational field is always only an apparent one. We might also think that, regardless of the kind of gravitational field which may be present, we could always choose another reference-body such that no gravitational field exists with reference to it. This is by no means true for all gravitational fields, but only for those of quite special form. It is, for instance, impossible to choose a body of reference such that, as judged from it, the gravitational field of the earth (in its entirety) vanishes.

We can now appreciate why that argument is not convincing, which we brought forward against the general principle of relativity at the end of the general principle of relativity at the end of Section XVIII. It is certainly true that the observer in the railway carriage experiences a jerk forwards as a result of the application of the brake, and that he recognises in this the nonuniformity of motion (retardation) of the carriage. But he is compelled by nobody to refer this jerk to a “real” acceleration (retardation) of the carriage. He might also interpret his experience thus: “My body of reference (the carriage) remains permanently at rest. With reference to it, however, there exists (during the period of application of the brakes) a gravitational field which is directed forwards and which is variable with respect to time. Under the influence of this field, the embankment together with the earth moves non-uniformly in such a manner that their original velocity in the backwards direction is continuously reduced.

Bulletin

From the President

Dear Reader,

As the new year approaches, those of us involved in the Arts of Liberty Project have much to be grateful for. January 6 will mark the first birthday of its new parent organization, the Boethius Institute for the Advancement of Liberal Education. We have had a solid first year and are ready to expand our efforts in 2024, including publishing our Introductory Geometry and Arithmetic text by Michael Augros, author of Who Designed the Designer? Dr. Augros does an excellent job re-presenting key content from all of Euclid’s Elements in a clear, accessible way for high school students and life-long learners. This volume has been downloaded for years by many around the world from the Arts of Liberty website; its new existence in a durable, easy-to-read printed volume will introduce the wonders of classic geometry to thousands more learners.

Returning the Quadrivium to its rightful place in liberal arts studies is high on the Boethius Institute priority list. Properly presented, mathematics introduces the young mind to the life of knowledge by arousing wonder through careful reasoning. As Dr. Augros writes,

Geometry is full of wonders. At every level of this science, from the most elementary to the most advanced, we are confronted with the unexpected. Often the seemingly possible turns out to be impossible, and conversely what at first seemed impossible turns out to be possible.

Our Quadrivium students at the Pascal Instituut experienced this in a recent discussion of Euclid’s treatment of incommensurable magnitudes. Said one, “It is not possible that two lines can be incommensurable! You can divide them into parts as small as you want. You must be able to find a common measure!” And yet, Euclid shows it is not so.

Classical mathematics is so formative because it occupies the sweet spot for human knowing by relying on both imagination and argumentation. For this reason among others, encouraging the development of the imagination in the young is crucial for learning ordered to knowledge, as elementary teacher Forest Barnette points out in her article “On Early Education in the Liberal Arts:”

Imagination is not an alternative to reality – it’s the key to reality. Imagination helps us to understand the most fundamental truths around us: it helps us to explore what is beyond the physical limitations of the moment; it helps us to explore what isn’t by showing us what is preventing it from being so; and it helps us to explore what could be by going beyond the is and isn’ts and into the unknown.

Nurturing the mathematical imagination is not only delightful in itself, but also immensely helpful in making science both practical and liberating, as aeronautics engineer Liam Collins witnesses in his article, “Dr. William McLean and Imaginative Creativity.” Albert Einstein shows us his creative imagination at work in using a magical space elevator to provide the fundamental insight for his theory of general relativity.

As Socrates and Plato experienced, classical mathematics can set ablaze the love of wisdom in a budding philosopher. We taste truth and yet cannot help but question existence. Working through the Elements was my first experience of learning indubitable truth. At the same time, doubts about the reality of points without parts and breadthless lengths were also present from the very beginning. And, as far as we can tell, regular 15-sided polygons inscribed in a circle exist nowhere in the natural world, much less inscribed dodecahedrons; probably we can't really make tangents to circles. But the delight in geometry and arithmetic does not depend upon being able to find their objects in physical reality; in some way it is enhanced because we are easily convinced that we cannot. We find them in our imagination. And yet they are true and objective -- the imagination is fed by and determined by our experience of sensible reality, as it is empowered by the intellect.

I am very grateful to announce that last month we received IRS approval of our tax-exempt status. We hope the publication of Dr. Augros’s volume will just be the beginning of our Library of Liberal Arts series. Several more volumes are ready to be edited, and we need to commission our volumes on grammar, rhetoric, and music. If you are able to make a financial contribution, we will be deeply grateful. Small gifts go a long way in a new organization like ours, and also help us to show potential major benefactors that we are serving a widely felt need.

We hope your hearts rejoice in the peace of this season. 

Bulletin

The Consolation of Philosophy Excerpt

This excerpt is taken from Book I of the Consolation of Philosophy (Ignatius Critical Editions Series: Goins, Scott, and Barbara H. Wyman, eds. & trans. 2012.) 

In just this way the clouds of my sorrow were dispelled. Now my eyes drank in the bright light of heaven, and I could recognize the face of the one who was healing me. When I cast my eyes upon her and fixed my gaze, I saw it was the one whose home I had visited since my youth—the Lady Philosophy, my nurse. “Why have you come down from on high to see me in the loneliness of my exile, O lady of all virtues? Do you wish to stand on trial with me and face the charges they have falsely laid against me?”
Would I desert you, my child?” she replied. “Wouldn’t I help you carry this burden of ours that has been laid upon your shoulders by those that hate me? It would not be right for Philosophy to let an innocent man walk his path alone. To think that I would be afraid to face an accusation or tremble in fear—as if such charges were new to me!
“Do you think this is the first time that wicked men have made assaults against the walls of wisdom?” she said. “Didn’t we often have to engage in battle against rash folly in the old days, before the time of my Plato? And while Plato lived, didn’t I stand beside his Socrates as he won victory by death, a death he did not deserve? And after that, the Epicurean and Stoic herds and all the rest tried to snatch his legacy, every man for himself. They grabbed me, too, as their prey while I shouted and struggled against them, and they ripped this garment of mine, which I had woven myself. As they went away with some little shreds torn from it, they thought that I had yielded myself completely to them. Since these men were seen with little bits of my clothing, they were foolishly assumed to be my friends. How many of them were destroyed by the errors of the crowd!
“But even if you don’t know about the older examples, like Anaxagoras’ flight, the poisoning of Socrates, or Zeno’s tortures, surely you could have thought about men like Seneca, Canius, or Soranus—such examples are hardly ancient or obscure. These men died simply because they were trained in my ways and had no taste for the pursuits of wicked men. So don’t be surprised if we’re tossed about by storms on the sea of life, when we ourselves have chosen to be displeasing to the wicked. Indeed, we must despise their army, even if it is a large one, since no general directs it. Instead, it rushes about, carried here and there by a flood of error. If this army should set itself into ranks and attack us fiercely, we have a leader who will draw us into her fortress, while our enemies spend their time searching for their little bags of plunder. Yet we, untouched by their mad confusion, look down and laugh as they grab at every worthless thing they can find. Their cunning folly cannot climb the walls that keep us safe.

The virtuous man,
calm in his orderly life,
stares Fortune in the face
and drives proud Fate beneath his feet.
He holds high his unconquerable head!
Nothing shall move that man—
not the madness and menace of the sea
disturbing the tide,
nor Vesuvius’ broken furnace
hurling rock,
nor the bolts of heaven’s fire
striking towers.
Why do miserable men wonder
at raging tyrants
with no true strength?

Bulletin

Machiavelli’s Idealism

“...Machiavelli exaggerates his praise of [Cesare] Borgia, whose actions, by those very same standards, ought to condemn him as a rather foolhardy failure”(1) – John McCormick

While serving in the Arizona legislature for the last ten years, I also taught Humane Letters at a classical school for several years where we read and held seminar discussions on The Prince. Reading and discussing this with seniors while seeing it unfold before me at the state capitol led to my abhorrence of Machiavelli and Machiavellianism. During my tenure I saw enough of Machiavellianism to last a lifetime. I was promised campaign cash and support if I “voted the right way.”(2) I regularly witnessed legislators berate members of the other party on the House Floor, yet joking and laughing with them immediately afterward  in the Member’s Lounge. On one occasion, I asked a Representative why he was so harsh towards the other legislator on the House Floor he said, “The camera was on.”

I rejected Machiavelli for many reasons. I despise his τελος – the acquiring and maintenance of power as the sine qua non concerning things of the public. Further, his view of human nature leads to misanthropy. I’m also offended by the idea that one cannot succeed in politics without perpetrating evil, since many have successfully passed good laws without resorting to the tactics he advised in his infamous work, myself included.

Yet modern man continues to idealize Niccolo Machiavelli and his ideal prince, Cesare Borgia, in spite of the fact that both were failures. The historical record along with the written work of The Prince paints a markedly different picture in reality than what’s commonly accepted about these two men. Niccolo Machiavelli, the 15th century Florentine secretary who has made no small impact on the divorce between morality and politics was himself a failure – in this life and the next. As was his ideal prince, Cesare Borgia. Thus, either Machiavelli has written ineffectual truth, or The Prince is a work of the same idealism that he notoriously criticizes.

One ought to approach Niccolo Machiavelli realistically – his life, his teaching, and his intellectual impact. Or so it seems. That is, unless one wishes to perceive reality as one wishes it to be rather than as it is. Looking past what is imagined about Niccolo’s life, his work, and his ideal prince, one notices a variance with what modern man considers him to be. Given Niccolo’s emphasis on history – real republics and principalities, one should examine the historical record to ensure one does not give unmerited justification where little is warranted.

On December 10, 1513 Niccolo wrote a well-known letter to papal ambassador Francesco Vettori. In it, he describes his exile, his failure to find a job suitable to his literary talent, and his imaginary dinners with the ancients. After lamenting his job as a day laborer and the vulgarity of the commoners, Machiavelli does what most men do not do. The author most known for realpolitik changed his clothes from a laborer into “regal and courtly garments.” It is here where he imagined ancient men – men who died thousands of years ago, who entertain him as their dinner guest. He writes that these long since dead men “receive him in affection,” where he imagines discussions with them for hours concerning the substance of what ultimately goes into The Prince – “what a princedom is, the kinds of princedoms, how one gains them, how they are kept, and why they are lost.”(3)  Niccolo writes,

I enter the courts of ancient men, where received by them with affection, I feed on that food which only is mine and which I was born for, where I am not ashamed to speak with them and to ask them the reason for their actions; and they in their kindness answer me; and for hours of time I do not feel boredom, I forget every trouble, I do not dread poverty, I am not frightened by death; entirely I give myself over to them.(4)

Of course, within today’s classical tradition, seminar participants read the ancients and have a qualitatively different kind of dialogue with them through the annotation of texts and discussion with other presently existing seminar participants. However, no one who lives in reality imagines one is actually present at dinner with no longer sentient men where one dresses up in the wardrobes found in the courts of the ancients and converses with dead men for hours. The former occurs frequently in seminar discussion, the latter more often at state-run hospitals. Niccolo himself is lucid enough to recognize he has written something fanciful in The Prince near the conclusion of this letter where he says to Vettori, “And if you ever can find any of my fantasies pleasing, this one should not displease you...”(5) While scholars continue to speculate on Machiavelli’s motivation for writing The Prince, he himself described his text as a flight of imagination, not reality.

Further, Niccolo never lived to see the reaction to The Prince nor its intellectual and immoral impact since he wrote it in 1513 but it was published posthumously in 1532, five years after his death.(6) Machiavelli was a frustrated literary genius whom fate had dealt a harsh hand. He thus needed an outlet to not only direct his talent towards, but more basically, he desired meaningful employment that didn’t consist of laboring on the family farm. In another letter to Vettori, Niccolo writes “There is my wish that our present Medici lords will make use of me, even if they begin by making me roll a stone...”(7) That is, Niccolo wanted something more than subsistence living and conversation with the plebians whose thoughts didn’t rise to the lofty heights of the ideal world he formerly immersed himself into. While in forced exile, Niccolo writes of his poverty and such interactions as following:

I speak with those who pass, ask news of their villages, learn various things, and note the various tastes and different fancies of men. In the course of these things comes the hour for dinner, where with my family I eat such food as this poor farm of mine and my tiny property allow. Having eaten, I go back to the inn; there is the host, usually a butcher, a miller, two furnace tenders. With these I sink into vulgarity for the whole day, playing at cricca and at trich-trach, and then these games bring on a thousand disputes and countless insults with offensive words, and usually we are fighting over a penny, and nevertheless we are heard shouting as far as San Casciano. So, involved in these trifles, I keep my brain from growing moldy, and satisfy the malice of this fate of mine, being glad to have her drive me along this road, to see if she will be ashamed of it.(8)

One can nearly hear lamentations from this literary talent who once rubbed shoulders with heads of state and other diplomats but has now fallen upon hard times. Yet such criticism goes well beyond Machiavelli and extends to the one historical character the author devotes more time to than any other – Cesare Borgia.(9) Like Machiavelli, he too was a failure in his life.

Cesare was born into a very promising name - Caesar in Italian, yet his life and early demise was of little importance. Niccolo gives Cesare the highest of accolades by calling him “prudent and virtuous” in addition to illustrating Cesare as the best example a prince who uses evil as necessary, conquers others through fear or fraud – the man who knew in practice how to maintain his grip on the levers of power (The Prince, VII). This is puzzling given Cesare’s continued reliance upon fortune, his dependence upon his father, and his untimely demise. Instead of having taken Machiavelli’s advice and beating Lady Fortune like a woman (The Prince, XXV), Pope Julius II forced Cesare to continue to depend upon the arms of others. At no time after his father’s death was Cesare self-sufficient as any successes he achieved solely depended upon his own father-patron. Renzo Sereno notes, “Caesar’s attempts at kingdom-building in Romagna fell very short of the most pessimistic expectations. His realm collapsed almost at once with the death of Alexander VI [Cesare’s father].”(10) Indeed, without his father to supply him with arms, he quickly fell out of power and lost everything. In contrasting Cesare with Agathocles, John McCormack notes that “Agathocles retained his principality much more successfully and with greater longevity than did the duke [Cesare], whose kingdom evaporated with his father’s death.”(11) When Alexander VI died of syphilis or poisoning, Pope Julius had Cesare arrested and deprived him of his arms and territories.(12) Thus, Cesare’s dependence upon his father became glaringly evident and one wonders why Niccolo continues to praise him in such a manner. Instead of depending upon his own military prowess as Machiavelli advises, Cesare died at the young age of thirty-two in poverty, with scurvy, and a significant case of syphilis that forced him to wear a mask due to the disfigurement it caused. Indeed, the men who killed him had no idea whom they had just killed. They stripped him of his clothes and left his naked body to lie in the dirt.(13) In summary, Machiavelli’s ideal prince was jailed, tortured, and died in poverty with a disease riddled body in a foreign country while in forced exile having been rejected by the Pope, Florence, and France. One would be hard pressed to find a better illustration of such a massive failure.

Neither Machiavelli himself, Cesare Borgia, nor any other mortal were able to live up to the embodiment of Machiavellian virtu. Yet the classical tradition does have a real life example of a successful and moral politician in reality, someone whom the American Founders held dear – Marcus Tullius Cicero. So it is of no small surprise that Machiavelli seeks to tear down Ciceronian ideas of just war, keeping faith, and natural law. So why is the classical tradition so willing to privilege such a man and replace Cicero for an idealized fantasy from the fanciful imagination of a failed secretary and his failure of a prince?

(1) The Enduring Ambiguity of Machiavellian Virtue, John McCormick (2014)
(2)  For this to be proven illegal in a court of law, the Arizona Statute governing bribery means the legislator must be promised a specific dollar amount for a specific vote – A.R.S. 13-2602
(3) Letter to Franceso Vettori, Dec. 10, 1513
(4) Ibid
(5) Ibid
(6) https://www.bu.edu/articles/2013/machiavelli-the-prince-still-relevant-after-all-these-years
(7)  Machiavelli’s “Prince”, Political Science or Political Satire? Garrett Mattingly Revisited
(8)  Letter to Franceso Vettori, Dec. 10, 1513
(9)  In case there was any doubt as to Machiavelli’s illustration of Cesare Borgia as the ideal prince of The Prince, he writes: "Thus if I summed up all the actions of the duke [Cesare Borgia], I would not know how to reproach him; on the contrary, it seems to me he should be put forward, as I have done, to be imitated by all those who have risen to empire through fortune and by the arms of others. For with his great spirit and high intention, he could not have conducted himself otherwise and the only things in the way of his plans were the brevity of Alexander's life and his own sickness. So whoever judges it in his new principality to secure himself against enemies, to gain friends to himself, to conquer either by force or by fraud, to make himself loved and feared by the people, and followed and revered by the soldiers, to eliminate those who can or might offend you, to renew old orders through new modes, to be severe and pleasant, magnanimous and liberal, to eliminate an unfaithful military, to create a new one, to maintain friendships with kings and princes so that they must either benefit you with favor or be hesitant to offend you - can find no fresher examples than the examples of that man" (The Prince, VII).
(10)  A falsification by Machiavelli, Renaissance News (1959), Renzo Sereno
(11)  The Enduring Ambiguity of Machiavellian Virtue, John McCormick (2014), Social Research journal, p 141
(12)  Niccolo’s Smile, a biography of Machiavelli, Maurizio, Viroli (2001), p 75
(13)  The Life of Cesare Borgia, Rafael Sabatini, p 449

Bulletin

Introducing the Boethius Institute

The Arts of Liberty Project began over twenty years ago as an idea Dr. Jeffrey Lehman had as a graduate student at the University of Dallas. He saw the wealth of wisdom in the Western tradition, but he also saw the dire need to recover that wisdom for the modern world. In 2008, Dr. Lehman launched the Arts of Liberty website, and built it up to become the leading provider of online materials for those desiring to teach and learn in the tradition of education based on the liberal arts of the Trivium and Quadrivium.

The Boethius Institute for the Advancement of Liberal Education is the natural outgrowth and completion of Arts of Liberty. The life of learning is not meant to be lived in isolation. As we long to learn, we long for teachers and fellow learners.

So Philip ran up to [the chariot] and heard him reading the prophet Isaiah. He asked, “Do you understand what you are reading?” He replied, “How can I, unless someone guides me?” And he invited Philip to get in and sit beside him. Acts 8:30-31

As we learn, we long to share what we learn with friends. Jeff and I have known the blessings of strong academic fellowship from our experiences at institutions such as Thomas Aquinas College and Hillsdale College, and we long to share this experience with others devoted to liberal education. In January of 2023, we founded the Boethius Institute to unite those devoted to serving the booming liberal arts renewal in collective learning and collaborative efforts.

On August 4th, over a dozen of  our Fellows of the Boethius Institute gathered at the Augustine Institute in Denver for our first colloquium. We spent the weekend discussing Boethius’s Consolation of Philosophy as we learned more about the great figure whom we chose as our patron. Boethius grounded his love of philosophical and theological wisdom on a serious practice of the trivial and quadrivial arts, as witnessed by the mastery of poetry, logic, rhetoric, astronomy, and music shown by Lady Philosophy.

Though his own life’s work was cut short by his imprisonment and martyrdom at the age of 43, he had so absorbed the arts of liberal learning that they poured forth in a work of magnificent pathos, beauty, subtlety, and wisdom, which ensured that the nascent Christian West would reverence the gold to be found in ancient learning. We aspire to become modern-day Boethians, embodying the liberal arts in service to wisdom, and wisdom in service to Church and society. Our coat of arms expresses this aspiration. It emphasizes the importance of wisdom as the culmination of the life of learning and the lynch-pin of service through the Greek letters, pi and theta, which Boethius saw on Lady’s Philosophy’s garment, signifying the interconnection of the practical and theoretical branches of philosophy. The white cross on a red field signifies the arms of the city of Pavia, Italy, where Boethius was martyred and his cult developed. The illumination coming from the book being read symbolizes our life of learning and the fruit that comes from it.

Our central work right now is our formation program in the liberal arts for current and future leaders of education renewal. Over the next two years, our Fellows will go through brief but rich courses in each of the arts of the traditional Trivium and Quadrivium, with a culminating course on the ordering of the liberal arts to a life of wisdom. We have begun by entering into an analytical understanding of Latin as an inflected language, enabling even those new to the language to use online analytical tools to help understand a range of translation possibilities. We have also reflected on the structure of language generally through the principles of a stem method approach to Latin and the medieval account of parts of speech and sentence construction. We will wrap up our study of grammar with an introduction to Greek, before moving on to logic.

Our Fellows in formation come from a variety of backgrounds and states in life. We have several young teachers new to liberal education, experienced teachers ambitious to start their own institutions of learning, several with advanced degrees in theology, a former state senator, the head of a Costa Rican university, and a software product manager focused on building resources for educators. I have been edified by the fact they are doing this with no thought of getting an accredited degree, but simply to satisfy their own desire to grow in traditional learning and from a commitment to make themselves the best educators they can be.

Our Senior Fellows have been active in other ways. We have contributed to the establishment of Principia, a new journal devoted to classical education, whose first two issues have included three pieces by our Senior Fellows, and where Jeff serves as an associate editor. We have made presentations at education-related conferences around the country on themes such the educational philosophy of Christopher Dawson, Lady Philosophy as physician of the mind in the Consolation of Philosophy, the artist’s fantasy in Tolkien’s Leaf by Niggle, and Thomas More’s use of the rhetorical progymnasmata exercises. In every venue, we have been encouraged by the strong desire to grow in and promote a complete liberal education. 

At the beginning of October, Jeff and I traveled to the Netherlands to begin a two-year-long course on the Quadrivium for the Pascal Instituut in Leiden, as they prepare to launch their own Master’s program in the Great Books. October has also seen the official launch of the Master of Arts in Catholic Education, which was founded by Jeff at the Augustine Institute in Denver, and will include challenging courses on the Trivium and Quadrivium, as well a strong grounding in Christian anthropology and the history of education.

It is encouraging to review what we have accomplished so far, and yet we feel eager to do so much more. Our world desperately needs to benefit from the wisdom of our cultural inheritance. We look forward to playing a significant role in the growing movement to make wisdom possible once again.

Bulletin

From the Director

Dear Reader,

Over the past year, I have studied, written about, and found inspiration in The Consolation of Philosophy. One of the great dialogues of ancient times, it was written by Boethius, a Roman consul, senator, philosopher, and theologian, during his imprisonment on charges of treason.

The beginning of the work finds a fictional version of Boethius wallowing in sorrow because, forgetting the lessons he had learned from his youthful devotion to the study of philosophy, he feels overwhelmed at the thought of how God had let unjust and wicked men succeed in their plots against him. In the midst of his self-pity, Philosophy appears to him as a Lady, who tries to console him by recalling how she had strengthened her devotees to not only endure unjust suffering, but to laugh at their enemies while doing so.

I have been fortunate in that I have not suffered injustice because of my service to Philosophy. Like many of you, however, I suffer discouragement from time to time as I join in the struggle to bring wisdom back to the world of education. The forces of folly can seem so powerful. Being reminded of philosophical heroes like Socrates and Seneca is encouraging, as is the hope that Philosophy brings by proclaiming the rewards of a life devoted to wisdom.

We are already beginning to taste those rewards through the growing Fellowship of the Boethius Institute for the Advancement of Liberal Education, as I detail here. One of our Fellows, Paul Boyer, is a contemporary Boethian - a former State Senator currently running for mayor of Glendale, Arizona, who is struck by irony that the mastermind of realpolitik, Macchiavelli, was a real life political failure.

If you want to find out more about our very busy summer and early fall, take a look at our Events calendar. I hope that we will be able to report more encouraging news in the coming months.

Bulletin

On the Liberal Arts in Response to an Article in Principia

As we mentioned in our last bulletin, a group of classical educators and scholars has launched Principia, a peer-reviewed journal dedicated to advancing scholarship on classical education. As Brian Williams, General Editor, reports in his article introducing the journal, forty years of education renewal has spawned a growing body of scholarly research and writing. Principia provides a “venue for robust and vigorous dialogue and debate about classical education” that “will make substantive and positive impacts on the practical implementation of classical education in schools and homes around the world.” Williams' own summative expression and description of classical education provides a strong beginning.

The goal of classical education is to educate whole persons through the accumulated wisdom of the ages for a lifetime of flourishing regardless of their profession or place of employment. It attempts to recover the integrated ends, curricular materials, pedagogical methods, and formative culture that characterize the 2,500-year old tradition of liberal arts education, while remaining open to new works of profound insight, beautiful artistry, and genuine discovery. (p.2)

Christopher Schlect’s article, “What is a Liberal Art?”, highlights the need for common dialogue and debate. By all accounts, the idea of the liberal arts was central to pre-twentieth century Western education, and most current educators in the revival of that education embrace their importance. But as Schlect relates, confusion and disagreement over what the term liberal arts means is prevalent today, not only among universities with no particular interest in classical views, but even among those deeply interested in them. Schlecht emphasizes the need for each educational institution to reach clarity on its own understanding of the liberal arts, while he believes that historical disagreements about their nature will prevent any widespread consensus among classical educators as a whole.

Schlecht expresses the consensus that guides his institution, New Saint Andrews College in Idaho:

The liberal arts teach us how to learn—how to freely gain knowledge and understanding. Insofar as they are arts, they produce something, in this case, the ability to learn. Because they are liberal arts, they liberate us not only from ignorance, prejudice, and provincialism but also from servile dependence on the tutelage of others. 

Schlect goes to clarify the significance of “servile”:

This notion of liberality does not exclude teachers, and it certainly does not suggest any radical notion of independence. Indeed, a liberally educated person continues to learn from teachers, and even relies on them. But he no longer depends upon any one teacher, nor upon a particular school of teachers, to initiate and direct his learning for him. A liberally educated person becomes the master over his own progress in learning. 

With deep respect for fellow laborers in the field, I think this is not only wrong, but dangerously wrong, especially as applied to pre-collegiate learning. A recipient of a serious liberal arts education has received a tremendous blessing. But he is certainly not ready to be set loose in a library, as Schlect suggests, inhabited by the likes of Plato, Aquinas, Hobbes, Kant, and Einstein, and press them into his service. Add Marx and Nietzsche, and our liberal arts graduate should be in terror of opening the books at all. As Aristotle and Aquinas say, to order belongs to the wise man. A young person trained in the liberal arts, but who has not been schooled in philosophy and theology, is far from being wise. He is capable of being taught by the wise man, but not of making wise judgments in the midst of powerful minds compellingly advocating for contrary answers to the fundamental questions of reality.

To understand the minds of any one of those authors takes a great deal of time and effort. The general mastery of words and quantities given by the traditional liberal arts makes understanding the authors possible but not easy. It takes docility and receptiveness, which are dangerously given to the sophistical and brilliant. Plato’s dialogue, The Protagoras, begins with the question of how a young man desiring to become really well educated can judge a teacher. Socrates warns him emphatically about the dangers of learning from just any teacher:

Now, if you are knowledgeable as to which of these wares are beneficial or harmful, you may
purchase learning, in safety, from Protagoras or anyone else at all. Otherwise beware, blessed
man, lest you take chances and imperil your most precious possessions; for there is
surely an even greater danger in the purchase of learning, than in the purchase of food….Learning, by contrast, cannot be borne away in a separate vessel. No, once the fee has been proffered, it is necessary to take that learning into the soul itself, and once you have learned something, you must go your way, having been either harmed or benefited thereby.
[313e] (Platonic Foundation translation)

What do the liberal arts produce in those who become proficient? In answer, Schlect is guided by the claim of Hugh of St. Victor  “that anyone who had been thoroughly schooled in them might afterward come to a knowledge of the others by his own inquiry and effort rather than by listening to a teacher” (Didascalicon. 3.3). As Schlect suggests, Hugh meant that the liberal arts opened up the world of books to the learner, so he could learn directly from the best minds of all time. But at that time, the world of books consisted of the Scriptures, the Fathers, monastic authors, along with the best moralists among the ancient Romans. The learner was expected to trust that all these authors were wise, not to judge among competing worldviews presented by powerful sophists. As Elizabeth Barrett Browning witnessed, even in the 19th century libraries were dangerous places.

Sublimest danger, over which none weeps,
When any young wayfaring soul goes forth
Alone, unconscious of the perilous road,
The day-sun dazzling in his limpid eyes,
To thrust his own way, he an alien, through
The world of books! Ah, you!—you think it fine,
You clap hands—‘A fair day!’—you cheer him on,
As if the worst, could happen, were to rest
Too long beside a fountain. Yet, behold,
Behold!—the world of books is still the world;
And worldlings in it are less merciful
And more puissant. For the wicked there
Are winged like angels. Every knife that strikes,
Is edged from elemental fire to assail
A spiritual life. The beautiful seems right
By force of beauty, and the feeble wrong
Because of weakness. Aurora Leigh

Too often high school graduates from liberal arts schools, although very grateful for what they have received, feel they are done with liberal education, and head to college to take on the serious business of preparing for a career. Often high school educators underestimate the crucial importance of their influence on inspiring a love of serious learning, and of directing their students towards the authors, programs, and professors that will guide them towards wisdom. For training in the liberal arts is only the beginning of a complete liberal education. As Newman wrote in the Preface to his Discourses on University Education, being well-grounded in grammar and mathematics will “make them feel nothing but impatience and disgust at the random theories and imposing sophistries and dashing paradoxes, which carry away half-formed and superficial intellects,” and will prepare them to be “gradually initiated into the largest and truest philosophical views.” But Newman warned it could also make them powerful proponents of error:

In all it will be a faculty of entering with comparative ease into any subject of thought, and of taking up with aptitude any science or profession. All this it will be and will do in a measure, even when the mental formation be made after a model but partially true; for, as far as effectiveness goes, even false views of things have more influence and inspire more respect than no views at all. Men who fancy they see what is not are more energetic, and make their way better, than those who see nothing; and so the undoubting infidel, the fanatic, the heresiarch, are able to do much, while the mere hereditary Christian, who has never realized the truths which he holds, is unable to do anything. 

As we think through together what is being accomplished in our times by the many different efforts to renew education in the light of (but not limited by) the successes of the past, the liberal arts should be differentiated from – while finding their role within – our understanding of liberal education as a whole. The liberal arts are to be treasured for the role they play in awakening and forming the mind, but they must not be considered to complete education to the point of making their possessors masters of their own learning. Rather, their most important role is to open the ways to begin to profit from the wisdom presented by authentic guides.

Bulletin

From the Director

Dear Reader,

Easter weekend has definitively proclaimed the arrival of Spring, at least in northern Iowa on the border of Minnesota. Two weeks ago, though Canadian geese filling the sky and fat robins returning to their territories spoke of spring as imminent, the deep snow cover made it hard to believe in new life. Trees produced buds in vain. But Nature is wise. This weekend brought our first days of 50, 60, and 70 degree weather, and the snow quickly melted away, revealing grass eager to make the earth green again. Soon green shoots will completely cover last year’s corn stalks in the fields.

In this mood of the joy of new life, I am delighted to announce a great step forward in the work of the Arts of Liberty Project. Taking inspiration from the great work in the preservation, development, and promotion of the liberal arts done by Boethius, the last great Roman statesman, Jeff Lehman and I have decided to found the Boethius Institute for the Advancement of Liberal Education. For over a decade, ArtsofLiberty.org has provided a wealth of materials that foster the understanding and practice of the traditional trivium and quadrivium as the proper foundation for a life devoted to wisdom. The Boethius Institute will follow in the footsteps of its patron by publicly defending the crucial role the liberal arts play in liberal education, adapting them to current circumstances and opportunities, and providing leaders of the growing liberal arts renewal with deeper formation in them.

Questions abound about the place and nature of the liberal arts today in what is often referred to as classical education. How should we understand and practice grammar, logic, and rhetoric? Do geometry, arithmetic, astronomy, and music have any role? How do the physical sciences, which are so important in modern education, fit into an education of which they have historically been a rival? In an excerpt from a fascinating essay on the rise to consciousness of an imaginary boy, George MacDonald imagined the effect of this rivalry on a serious young man. Scholarly discussion about these questions is revealing significant disagreements among practitioners. I express one of these disagreements in response to a recent article tackling the difficult question of defining what the expression “liberal art” means.

Opportunities also abound. Students who have received a strong liberal arts foundation are ready to achieve great heights in areas such as Latin, Greek, rhetoric, history, mathematics, philosophy, and theology. Teachers who have been successful in their particular classrooms and schools are ready to share how they have fed the natural hunger of the young for learning. When I met Lisa Vandamme at her school in Orange County, California, she was proud to introduce me to her eighth grade class, who impressed me with the passion and penetration of their answers to her question, “What has been your favorite work of literature during your time here?” She shares her fundamental secret in this issue of our bulletin.

To learn more about the Boethius Institute, visit our new website. We will keep you up-to-date on our various activities, such as our visit to the University of John Paul II in San Jose, Costa Rica.

Bulletin

Don Quixote Excerpt on Creative Writing

Miguel Cervantes’ masterpiece, Don Quixote, was considered “the final and greatest utterance of the human mind” by Doestoevsky, and was voted the best book ever written in a survey of top authors. Cervantes begins his prologue by speaking to the “Idle Reader”; the work presents a sustained reflection on the impact that the new reading culture had on 17th century Spanish society. Near the end of volume one, a learned clergyman reflects on the good, bad, and ugly of fictional writing, in words from which today’s creative writers can learn.

Don Quixote, Part I, Chapter XLVII

The canon and his servants were surprised anew when they heard Don Quixote's strange story, and when it was finished he said, "To tell the truth, senor curate, I for my part consider what they call books of chivalry to be mischievous to the State; and though, led by idle and false taste, I have read the beginnings of almost all that have been printed, I never could manage to read any one of them from beginning to end; for it seems to me they are all more or less the same thing; and one has nothing more in it than another; this no more than that.

“And in my opinion this sort of writing and composition is of the same species as the fables they call the Milesian, nonsensical tales that aim solely at giving amusement and not instruction, exactly the opposite of the apologue fables which amuse and instruct at the same time. And though it may be the chief object of such books to amuse, I do not know how they can succeed, when they are so full of such monstrous nonsense. For the enjoyment the mind feels must come from the beauty and harmony which it perceives or contemplates in the things that the eye or the imagination brings before it; and nothing that has any ugliness or disproportion about it can give any pleasure.

“What beauty, then, or what proportion of the parts to the whole, or of the whole to the parts, can there be in a book or fable where a lad of sixteen cuts down a giant as tall as a tower and makes two halves of him as if he was an almond cake? And when they want to give us a picture of a battle, after having told us that there are a million of combatants on the side of the enemy, let the hero of the book be opposed to them, and we have perforce to believe, whether we like it or not, that the said knight wins the victory by the single might of his strong arm. And then, what shall we say of the facility with which a born queen or empress will give herself over into the arms of some unknown wandering knight? What mind, that is not wholly barbarous and uncultured, can find pleasure in reading of how a great tower full of knights sails away across the sea like a ship with a fair wind, and will be to-night in Lombardy and to-morrow morning in the land of Prester John of the Indies, or some other that Ptolemy never described nor Marco Polo saw?

“And if, in answer to this, I am told that the authors of books of the kind write them as fiction, and therefore are not bound to regard niceties of truth, I would reply that fiction is all the better the more it looks like truth, and gives the more pleasure the more probability and possibility there is about it. Plots in fiction should be wedded to the understanding of the reader, and be constructed in such a way that, reconciling impossibilities, smoothing over difficulties, keeping the mind on the alert, they may surprise, interest, divert, and entertain, so that wonder and delight joined may keep pace one with the other; all which he will fail to effect who shuns verisimilitude and truth to nature, wherein lies the perfection of writing.

“I have never yet seen any book of chivalry that puts together a connected plot complete in all its numbers, so that the middle agrees with the beginning, and the end with the beginning and middle; on the contrary, they construct them with such a multitude of members that it seems as though they meant to produce a chimera or monster rather than a well-proportioned figure. And besides all this they are harsh in their style, incredible in their achievements, licentious in their amours, uncouth in their courtly speeches, prolix in their battles, silly in their arguments, absurd in their travels, and, in short, wanting in everything like intelligent art; for which reason they deserve to be banished from the Christian commonwealth as a worthless breed."

The curate listened to him attentively and felt that he was a man of sound understanding, and that there was good reason in what he said; so he told him that, being of the same opinion himself, and bearing a grudge to books of chivalry, he had burned all Don Quixote's, which were many; and gave him an account of the scrutiny he had made of them, and of those he had condemned to the flames and those he had spared.

The canon was not a little amused, adding that though he had said so much in condemnation of these books, still he found one good thing in them, and that was the opportunity they afforded to a gifted intellect for displaying itself; for they presented a wide and spacious field over which the pen might range freely, describing shipwrecks, tempests, combats, battles, portraying a valiant captain with all the qualifications requisite to make one, showing him sagacious in foreseeing the wiles of the enemy, eloquent in speech to encourage or restrain his soldiers, ripe in counsel, rapid in resolve, as bold in biding his time as in pressing the attack; now picturing some sad tragic incident, now some joyful and unexpected event; here a beauteous lady, virtuous, wise, and modest; there a Christian knight, brave and gentle; here a lawless, barbarous braggart; there a courteous prince, gallant and gracious; setting forth the devotion and loyalty of vassals, the greatness and generosity of nobles.

"Or again," said he, "the author may show himself to be an astronomer, or a skilled cosmographer, or musician, or one versed in affairs of state, and sometimes he will have a chance of coming forward as a magician if he likes. He can set forth the craftiness of Ulysses, the piety of Aeneas, the valour of Achilles, the misfortunes of Hector, the treachery of Sinon, the friendship of Euryalus, the generosity of Alexander, the boldness of Caesar, the clemency and truth of Trajan, the fidelity of Zopyrus, the wisdom of Cato, and in short all the faculties that serve to make an illustrious man perfect, now uniting them in one individual, again distributing them among many; and if this be done with charm of style and ingenious invention, aiming at the truth as much as possible, he will assuredly weave a web of bright and varied threads that, when finished, will display such perfection and beauty that it will attain the worthiest object any writing can seek, which, as I said before, is to give instruction and pleasure combined; for the unrestricted range of these books enables the author to show his powers, epic, lyric, tragic, or comic, and all the moods the sweet and winning arts of poesy and oratory are capable of; for the epic may be written in prose just as well as in verse."