Erik Ellis, Author at Arts of Liberty

January 17, 2025Bulletin

Friendship, History, and Tradition: Three Criteria for the Development of the Canon

I was recently asked by friends in South America to help set guidelines for the establishment of a canon of great books. At first glance, this might seem a straightforward or even unnecessary task. Surely, everyone knows which books are the great ones! And certainly, we can almost all agree on Homer, Plato, Aristotle, Augustine, Aquinas, Dante, and a few others, but any student of the history of Great Books programs will know that the details quickly become murky —and show definite biases— once one moves much beyond those universal authors. As a Roman Catholic and medievalist, I have long felt that a great weakness of Adler’s Great Books in the Western World is its deemphasis of Roman authors and the almost complete lack of medieval authors. I also dislike the resulting overemphasis on nineteenth-century and anglophone authors. These faults in Adler’s canon can almost certainly be explained by his peculiar taste, formed as it was in New York City in the first half of the twentieth century. Almost a century later, and with a Great Books movement that is becoming increasingly globalized, we may need to work to form a new canon, and that means developing criteria for selecting those works that are of universal importance.

The first criterion I settled on was friendship. This was based on my experience that each of us has a private canon of favorite books, and we share that canon with our friends and relations, often whether they want us to or not. They then might like a few of the books we recommend, and then share them with their friends or relations, and in a generation or so, a subculture has formed, with its own canon. I imagine that, given a sufficiently long temporal span, this is how all canons came to be, and it is a good place for us to start as we work to form our list of the books that every educated person should read. For my part, I am working to ensure that all of my friends and students read the Tablet of Cebes, and I would trade all of twentieth-century fiction and poetry for The Lord of the Rings.

The next important consideration for canon formation is history. History is intimately tied up with identity,

with questions of us and them. My discussions with colleagues in both North and South America have led me to conclude that we can use basically the same list of books until we reach the sixteenth century. Such a list includes the Hebrew Bible, Hellenism, the New Testament and the Fathers, and the common legal, philosophical, theological, and literary inheritance of Latin Christendom. After that, religious difference in North America and ethnic difference (more marked in the past and diminishing rapidly) between the two Americas makes finding undisputed and universally great books more difficult. We ought probably all to read Shakespeare and Cervantes, but must every student in Buenos Aires and Santiago read Huckleberry Finn? Ought every student in Dallas and Detroit read Martín Fierro? We may need to accept different lists for these more recent authors, at least until another century (or two) has passed, and we have the benefit of hindsight.

The last criterion is tradition, which is more abstract than the other two, in that it cannot be reduced to a finite list of texts, and also more concrete, in that tradition is more fundamental and constitutive of the practices that animate our day-to-day experience. Our common traditions include the seven liberal arts, the historical connection to or continuing participation in Latin Christendom, and the controversial legacies of empire, colonialism, and mestizaje that make us Western but not European, and American whether we live north or south of the equator. In our new canon, I hope we will take inspiration from the wise, old ordo disciplinarum, which tells us that we read Aristotle’s Rhetoric more profitably when we have first mastered Cicero’s, we understand the Nicomachean Ethics better when we have already learned the habit of virtue from Seneca, and we may love Wisdom more if we meet her first in Boethius’ cell rather than in Plato’s cave. And of course, our path to philosophy will be straighter and narrower the more we have mastered the arts of language and number.

It takes a generation to destroy a tradition and three to build one. I think we are about halfway through the second generation, and I am full of hope. I look forward to navigating the next cycle of cultural renewal with friends in Europe and in both halves of America as we chart a path forward.

September 18, 2024September 18, 2024Bulletin

From a Review of A Brief Quadrivium and Teaching the Quadrivium: A Guide for Instructors

From a review of A Brief Quadrivium and Teaching the Quadrivium: A Guide for Instructors originally published in Principia 3, no. 1 (2024)

Classical educators know that the canon of the liberal arts numbers seven, but very few of us make much progress beyond the trivium before we jump headfirst into philosophy. We approach advanced mathematics through the modern canon of algebra, geometry, trigonometry, and calculus, not the four arts of the quadrivium—geometry, arithmetic, music, and astronomy. Even the one common term, geometry, means different things. For most of us, it is something like applied algebra. The minority who have gone through Euclid will know that the classical art of geometry uses no numbers at all, only proportion. If we have some direct knowledge of the quadrivium this is only very rarely because we studied them as they are. We tend to learn about them, presenting them either as primitive (and therefore obsolete) forms of the STEM fields, or as a few wonder-inspiring diagrams of the golden ratio projected onto the masterpieces of the Old Masters sandwiched between sessions of mathematics classes hardly distinct from those offered in non-classical educational settings—two excellent starting places are Gary B. Meisner’s Golden Ratio and Mirana Lundy’s Quadrivum. In the end, if the quadrivium enters into our thinking or our teaching, it is at second or third hand, and we and our students at best come to appreciate its historical presence in the past of Western culture without acquiring the intellectual character or skills that would enable us to use the quadrivium productively in our own attempts to make the world more beautiful.

This is due to reasons both theoretical and practical. Many who would never question the enduring value of the arts of grammar, logic, or rhetoric struggle to see how the historically constructed quadrivium could be of any more than historical interest to contemporary educators. A deeper problem is that since antiquity these arts have been debased and abused, such that Latin dictionaries list “astrologer or wizard” as the second definition of the noun mathematicus. For such reasons, Plato’s Timaeus and Boethius’ De Arithmetica tend to be reserved for those undertaking advanced studies of those authors, and the immense influence exerted by these texts on Western culture is often presented as a curiosity or problem rather than as a fact whose recovery might lead to fresh insight in the present.

But what if contemporary students went beyond learning about the historical importance of the quadrivium and learned the content and skills embedded in study of the quadrivial subjects? While many of us make verum, bonum, pulchrum our motto, few of us are prepared to give any account of the final term. The classical education movement has recovered and redeployed the arts of language, showing that logic can still be used to gain certain knowledge of truth and that virtue ethics can still be a means of knowing and doing the good. Despite our recovery of the arts of language and our confidence in their ability to give us access to reality, many see beauty as being in the eye of the beholder rather than being a transcendental susceptible to objective analysis and real knowledge. Writers such as Stratford Caldecott and David Clayton have pointed to the quadrivium as the traditional means of setting the third transcendental, beauty, on an objective basis from which it can be contemplated, known, imitated, and produced.

It comes as no surprise that our inability to accommodate pre-Copernican astronomy and pre-Cartesian mathematics (with the notable exception of Euclid) to our narrative of scientific revolution and progress has not led many of us to develop classroom resources that would give our students access to these traditions and help them develop the skills the arts promise to impart. Green Lion Press, whose edition of Euclid is no doubt well known to many readers of Principia, follows a grand narrative of the “Scientific Revolution” to a great extent in their offerings, providing the text editions that make it possible for students in great books programs to re-create the discoveries of Kepler, Newton, Lavoisier, and Faraday. When I met Howard Fisher, an associate editor at Green Lion Press, I asked him why they do not offer editions of Aristoxenus, Boethius, or other “quadrivial” authors. He told me there is no editorial policy against it, and in fact, they would if they could. The problem, he said, is a lack of editors. Would I like, he added, to try my hand at doing it myself?

Fortunately for me, a humanist who has not yet mastered the arts of number, Peter Ulrickson has provided the sort of book I have long imagined but not had the skill to write. A Brief Quadrivium divides the four arts into a thirty-week curriculum, distributed approximately equally across geometry, arithmetic, music, and astronomy, ending with three brief chapters that consider the quadrivium’s relationship to modern physics, mathematics, and music theory and its propaedeutic role in “preparing us to seek the highest, unchanging things.” Upon completion of the curriculum, students will not only have been exposed to wonder, but they will also have laid the foundation of a detailed, technical knowledge of the quadrivium that they can use both to understand the nature of reality and to produce works of art, in the Aristotelian sense, imitating nature to bring order to chaos and instantiate beauty in the world.

A key component of Ulrickson’s presentation is the continuity of the quadrivium and the trivium as two parts of a whole, as opposed to the modern division of the disciplines into arts and sciences. An excellent example of this in practice is Ulrickson’s gentle but persistent and effective explanation and use of technical terminology. Relying on a philosophy of language based in Aristotelian ideas that recognizes the adaequatio of words, concepts, and things and the status of each of the components of the quadrivium as stable and articulated technai, Ulrickson provides readers with an account of terms like “definition,” “lemma,” “proposition,” and “conjecture” and encourages them to build up familiarity with them. Those who, like me, have made the transition from “literary studies” to the “trivium,” who have come to appreciate the precision that training in the arts of language can bring to conversations about the great ideas, will be pleased to ground their developing knowledge of the quadrivium in this system of language. Properly technical language is not jargon; it is rather a key constitutive element of the knowledge and practice of the art, and Ulrickson presents this in a compelling way that will resonate with classical educators.