Category: Bulletin

The concept of intellectual work has a number of historical antecedents, which can serve to clarify it.
First, it is based on a certain interpretation of the human knowing process.

What happens when our eye sees a rose? What do we do when that happens? Our mind does something, to be sure, in the mere fact of taking in the object, grasping its color, its shape, and so on. We have to be awake and active. But all the same, it is a ”relaxed” looking, so long as we are merely looking at it and not observing or studying it, counting or measuring its various features. Such observation would not be a ”relaxed” action: it would be what Ernst Jünger termed an ”act of aggression.”¹ But simply looking at something, gazing at it, ”taking it in,” is merely to open our eyes to receive the things that present themselves to us, that come to us without any need for ”effort” on our part to ”possess” them.

There would scarcely be any dispute about this, if we were speaking about an act of sense perception.
But what about an act of knowing? When a human being considers something imperceptible to the senses, is there then such a thing as mere ”looking”? Or, to use the scholastic technical terminology, is there such a thing as ”intellectual vision”?

The ancient and medieval philosophers answered, ”Yes.” Modern philosophers have tended to say, ”No.”
To Kant, for instance, the human act of knowing is exclusively ”discursive,” which means not ”merely looking.” ”The understanding cannot look upon anything.” ² This doctrine has been characterized, in brief, as ”one of the most momentous dogmatic assumptions of Kantian epistemology.”³ In Kant’s view, then, human knowing consists essentially in the act of investigating, articulating, joining, comparing, distinguishing, abstracting, deducing, proving – all of which are so many types and methods of active mental effort. According to Kant, knowing — (intellectual knowing, that is, by the human being) is activity, and nothing but activity.

It is no wonder that, starting from this basis, Kant was able to conclude that all knowing, even philosophy itself (since philosophy is at the greatest remove from sense perception), should be understood as a form of work.

And he said so expressly: in 1796, for example, in an article written to refute the Romantic ”vision” and ”intuitive” philosophy of Jacobi, Schlosser, and Stolberg.⁴ In philosophy, Kant objects, ”the law of reason is supreme, whereby property is possessed through labor.” And this Romantic philosophy cannot truly be a philosophy because it is not ”work.” This accusation he directs even against Plato, that ”Father of all raving enthusiasm in Philosophy,” while, Kant says with recognition and approval, ”Aristotle’s philosophy is truly work.” From such a perspective, originating from the exaltation of a ”philosophy of work,” the ”recently exalted, privileged tone of Philosophy” is branded as a false philosophy, in which one ”does not work but merely listens with delight to the oracle within oneself, in order to come into complete possession of the whole wisdom promised by philosophy.” And such a ”pseudo–philosophy” thinks itself superior to the strenuous labor of the true philosopher!

Now, ancient and medieval philosophy had quite the opposite view, without, of course, justifying any charge that philosophy was something ”easy.” Not only the Greeks in general – Aristotle no less than Plato – but the great medieval thinkers as well, all held that there was an element of purely receptive ”looking,” not only in sense perception but also in intellectual knowing or, as Heraclitus said, ”Listening-in to the being of things.”⁵

The medievals distinguished between the intellect as ratio and the intellect as intellectus. Ratio is the power of discursive thought, of searching and re-searching, abstracting, refining, and concluding [cf. Latin dis-currere, ”to run to and fro”], whereas intellectus refers to the ability of ”simply looking” (simplex intuitus), to which the truth presents itself as a landscape presents itself to the eye. The spiritual knowing power of the human mind, as the ancients understood it, is really two things in one: ratio and intellectus, all knowing involves both. The path of discursive reasoning is accompanied and penetrated by the intellectus’ untiring vision, which is not active but passive, or better, receptive – a receptively operating power of the intellect.

And something else must be added: the ancients likewise considered the active efforts of the discursive ratio to be the essentially human element of human knowing; ratio as the decisively human activity was contrasted with the intellectus, which had to do with what surpasses human limits. Of course, this ”super-human” power nevertheless does belong to man, and what is ”essentially human” alone does not exhaust the knowing power of human nature; for it is essential to the human person to reach beyond the province of the human and into the order of angels, the truly intellectual beings.

”Although human knowing really takes place in the mode of ratio, nevertheless it is a kind of participation in that simple knowing which takes place in higher natures, and we can thus conclude that human beings possess a power of intellectual vision.” These are the words of Thomas Aquinas, Disputed Questions on Truth.⁶ This statement means that human knowing is a partaking in the nondiscursive power of vision enjoyed by the angels, to whom it has been granted to ”take in” the immaterial as easily as our eyes take in light or our ears sound. Human knowing has an element of the non-active, purely receptive seeing, which is not there in virtue of our humanity as such, but in virtue of a transcendence over what is human, but which is really the highest fulfillment of what it is to be human, and is thus ”truly human” after all (in the same way, again
according to Thomas Aquinas, the vita contemplativa as the highest form of human living is not ”properly human, but superhuman”: non proprie humana, sed superhumana).⁷

For the ancient and medieval philosophers the ”laboring” nature of the human ratio was likewise a mark of its humanness. The operation of the ratio, its discursive thinking process, really is work, and a difficult activity.
But the simple act of the intellectus is not work. And whoever thinks, along with the ancients, that human knowing is a mutual interplay of ratio and intellectus; whoever can recognize an element of intellectual vision within discursive reasoning; whoever, finally, can retain in philosophy an element of contemplation of being as a whole such a person will have to grant that a characterization of knowing and philosophy as ”work” is not only not exhaustive, but does not even reach the core of the matter, and that something essential is in fact missing from such a definition. Certainly, knowing in general and philosophical knowing in particular cannot take place without the effort and activity of discursive reasoning, without the ”nuisance of labor” (labor improbus) involved in all ”intellectual work.” Even so, there is something else in it, and something essential to it, that is not work.

Excerpt from Leisure
The Basis of Culture
Josef Pieper
Introduction by Roger Scruton
New translation by Gerald Malsbary
St. Augustine’s Press
South Bend, Indiana
1998

1. Blätter und Steine (Hamburg, 1934), p. 202. ↩︎
2. I. Kant, Kritik der reinen Vernunft, ed. R. Schmidt (Leipzig, 1944) p. 91. ↩︎
3. Bernhard Jansen, Die Geschichte der Erkenntislehre in der neueren Philosophie bis Kant (Paderborn,
   1940), p. 235. ↩︎
4. ”Von einem neuerdings erhobenen vornehmen Ton in der Philosophie,” Akademie-Ausgabe 8, pp. 387-
   406. ↩︎
5. Diels-Kranz, ed., Die Fragmente der Vorsokratiker, frag. 112. ↩︎
6. Q.XV,1. ↩︎
7. Quaestio disputata de virtutibus cardinalibus 1. ↩︎

Well-Read Mom’s mission addresses several pressing needs: combating loneliness, cultivating leisure, and fostering meaningful discussions. We encourage women to read without guilt, even when there is no immediate utilitarian purpose, because there is a higher “work” at play – to take care of one’s heart— and to rediscover the joy of engaging with transformative literature.

The Role of Introspection and Imagination

Readers who engage with literature thoughtfully—not just to “get through the story” but to seek meaning—activate their imagination to decipher the book’s relevance to their lives. This form of reading encourages critical thinking, cultivates the moral imagination, and trains aesthetic appreciation. By weighing the proposals of literature against one’s education, formation, and religious sensibilities, readers develop a deeper understanding of themselves and the world.

The Transformative Power of Leisure and Literature

Joseph Pieper, a twentieth-century German philosopher, highlighted a fundamental issue in modern culture through his prophetic essay Leisure: The Basis of Culture. He underscored a crucial truth: we lack genuine leisure time. However, leisure is not simply idle time; it is a “receptive attitude of mind, a contemplative attitude, and it is not only the occasion but also the capacity for steeping oneself in the whole of creation.” Leisure provides space to think about the origins of things and the deeper meaning of life. Pieper’s insights reveal the transformative potential of leisure and provide a framework for understanding literature’s profound role in our lives.

 Ratio and Intellectus: Two Types of Work

Pieper distinguishes between two types of work: ratio and intellectus. Ratio refers to work that is measurable, observable, and ordered toward productivity—the kind of work essential for keeping society well-ordered. On the other hand, intellectus is a higher form of work that is not primarily driven by productivity but by cultivating our humanity. This metaphysical aspect of human existence requires thought, insight, receptivity, and intuition.

Leisure, therefore, is not a luxury but a necessary commitment. It allows us to step outside the demands of the workaday world and connect with deeper aspects of our being. By nurturing thought and contemplation, leisure fosters an environment where intellectus can thrive.

Reading as a Gateway to Leisure

Reading great books is vital for habituating leisure in Pieper’s sense of the word. When we immerse ourselves in literature, we encounter moments of introspection that allow us to step into the characters’ lives, reflect on their actions and choices, and see our lives in a new light. Through these encounters, literature engages us with the good, the true, and the beautiful.

However, not all literature holds equal value. As readers, we should approach books as consumers seeking entertainment and individuals seeking transformation. Quality literature invites us to ask profound questions: Why am I here? How ought I to live? What does a good life look like? How does an experience of beauty change my heart? By proposing concrete examples of how others have grappled with these questions, literature becomes an avenue for self-reflection and growth.

Friendship and Leisure

Over the past fourteen years, Well-Read Mom has grown tremendously, now serving over 11,000 worldwide.  We provide a yearly companion, a curated book list, discussion questions, and a methodology inviting introspection, fostering friendship, and support to begin and sustain a deep reading practice. Well-Read Mom is for all women, not just biological mothers, as we understand motherhood in the broad sense of helping to nurture life. 

Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics speaks of three types of friendship: friendships based on utility, pleasure, and the highest form—friendship based on the pursuit of a good life. Cultivating leisure creates the space for this highest form of friendship, as it prioritizes time not spent in utility but in contemplation and meaningful engagement.

Through the structure and support provided by Well-Read Mom, women have discovered how literature helps them form friendships rooted in the pursuit of truth, beauty, and goodness. Together, they explore literature that challenges and inspires them to live more thoughtful, intentional lives. We have discovered an interesting ripple effect: when women read more, men and children read more. These effects are not contained to the family but spill onto the larger community. 

Reclaim leisure

Joseph Pieper’s call to reclaim leisure as a cornerstone of culture remains profoundly relevant. By setting aside time for contemplation and engaging with transformative literature, we cultivate our humanity and foster deeper connections with others. Reading with introspection allows us to encounter life’s profound questions, opening us up to truth, beauty, and moral insight. By doing so, we take a significant step toward living richer, more meaningful lives.

Are you interested in learning more about Well-Read Mom?

Learn about our mission, vision, and method for reading literature to cultivate leisure and transform your life on our website: https://wellreadmom.com/

To find a community near you, click on our map feature: https://wellreadmom.com/find-your-community/

Colleen Hutt is the Director of Literary Evangelization for Well-Read Mom and Co-author of The Well-Read Life: Nourish Your Soul through Deep Reading and Intentional Friendship by Marcie Stokman and Colleen Hutt

On Thursday, I boarded a plane for Florence, Italy. By Sunday evening, I was wandering starry-eyed through the Piazza della Signoria at twilight, surrounded by a living museum of Renaissance sculptures standing at the foot of the 14th century stone tower of the Palazzo Vecchio, once the palace of the Medicis, now the city’s seat of government. I was among throngs of people, most of whom, like me, had traveled halfway across the world to be dazzled by the proud commanding figures of idealized human form. 

I came here to immerse myself in the fierce beauty of a culture that sought to reflect the order of the cosmos in every sculpture, cathedral, fresco, and yes, even that divinely anointed ritual: the cappuccino. 

Making time for contemplative encounters with beautiful art is essential for our survival. As a species, we long for narrative and wholeness. We weave tapestries, paint images, write stories, and compose symphonies because we sense at our core that all the fragments and experiences of our earthly existence belong to something greater than the individual parts. Yet in our digital era, it is entirely possible to suppress this. If we let ourselves, we can live out our lives in a safe sameness constructed out of our fears, desires and preferences, unclouded by disagreement, discomfort or change. And yet, there in our self-made bubbles, we will ache with our apart-ness, for at our core, to be human is to long for wholeness, which by necessity contains variety and communion. 

Art, if great, can give us glimpses of this all-encompassing integration. An artist aiming to reflect the harmonious nature of all creation will not shy away from disagreement, discomfort or rupture, but will lovingly arranging in truthful hues the ugly and the beautiful, the painful and the joyful, the defeats and the triumphs in light of the unified whole that redeems the ruptures and wrongs of its individual parts. 

Since a young age I’ve been acutely aware of the beautifully woven fabric that this world and all its varying parts form. I was raised in a home of strong faith and values, where I was taught how to be a good member of my family and society through conversation, prayer, great books, art, nature, and music. Each of these areas played an important role in forming my character, but it was primarily in classical music that I heard the tensions, aches, and longings of this world resolved with the ideals and virtues taught to me in my education and Christian faith. 

In the richly varied, powerful strains of conflict and resolution, I heard a world in which disagreements resolved into clarified harmonies, where the dark, despairing elements could transform into soaring melodies of exquisite hope. Classical music formed a stream of sound that washed over me; beauty, truth and goodness became not just knowable, but habitable. 

As a ten-year-old, I would often sit on our couch, enraptured by the instrumental world of Benjamin Britten’s Young Person’s Guide to the Orchestra. Listening to the orchestra’s careful disassembly and reassembly, I found myself not only learning about the structure of orchestral music but also discovering how the world around me was intricately designed—each piece fitting seamlessly into a magnificent cosmic puzzle.

Music enables submersion in this revealed reality, for we can quite literally step into its waters and let the waves of sound wash over us, baptizing us in the healed unity of all things. The specific genre of classical music ensures this experience, since it is founded on the principles of cohesion and integration, in which each musical line and the notes within it function according to a clear direction, purpose and relationship to everything above, below, before and after the sounded notes of each moment. 

It developed this way because of origins in medieval chant, which sought to bring heavenly realities down to earth through notation. As monks learned the art of stacking musical lines to create a new vertical sense in addition to the horizontal, music began to climb, building a rich, transcendent texture that resembled the cathedrals of its cities. After an exhilarating period of innovation and experimentation during the Renaissance and Baroque eras, composers of the Classical era enshrined all that had come before them into musical forms that reflected the Enlightenment ideals of equality and justice for all. 

While the Founding Fathers of America were building a new democratic order founded on these ideals, Joseph Haydn, fondly referred to as the “Father of the Symphony,” was fine-tuning the sonata form—a pinnacle musical construct that gave contrasting musical ideas a clear map in which they could converse, develop and resolve. In a piece of music that follows the sonata form, we hear musical themes blossom then explore and discuss, as they react to new key areas and melodic content. By the end, all musical themes introduced at the start of the piece have transformed into a new landscape made richer by the musical journey and conversation.

In the prized classical genre of the concerto, a soloist shines in the spotlight while the orchestra supports it with accompanying harmonies, offering a fitting musical portrayal of an individual interacting with his surroundings. Derived from the Italian word “concertare” which is in turn derived from Latin, “concerto” quite aptly has two opposing meanings: “to dispute/contend” and “to agree/arrange.” A concerto displays both meanings of the word: as we listen to the interplay between the soloist and the orchestra, we are struck by the vulnerability of an individual as both uniquely set apart from and deeply embedded within the world at large. 

Classical music offers cathartic moments of “dispute” and “agreement,” whereby conflicts resolve into shared communions oriented toward the true, the good and the beautiful. Whether it be sacred polyphonic strains reaching to the cosmos, an enlightened conversation poured into a sonata mold, or a concerto soloist showcasing the unique dignity of each individual within society, notes assemble all of the pieces-–bright, dark, and everything in between—into richly cohesive, redemptive wholes. 

Sadie Hoyt is a classical pianist, music educator, and founder of Classical Encounters, a business dedicated to helping families, schools, and adult learners deepen their appreciation and knowledge of classical music. You can peruse her curricula, book, courses, listening guides, and free resources at sadiehoyt.com

Blessed is everyone who fears the Lord,
    who walks in his ways!
You shall eat the fruit of the labor of your hands;
    you shall be blessed, and it shall be well with you.

Your wife will be like a fruitful vine
    within your house;
your children will be like olive shoots
    around your table.
Behold, thus shall the man be blessed
    who fears the Lord.

The Lord bless you from Zion!
    May you see the prosperity of Jerusalem
    all the days of your life!
May you see your children’s children!
    Peace be upon Israel!

Psalm 128

I felt the truth of this Psalm during a delightful 10 days spent in Southern California and Arizona during the middle of February. I traded -17° for lovely spring weather in the 60s and 70s. It was a time to celebrate old friendships and new life. I got to hold Angela Carmel, the newly baptized first child of my youngest son. And I got to laud my longtime fellow laborer in the field of education renewal, Michael Van Hecke, who along with his wife, Jessie, received a lifetime honor award for their service of leadership at Saint Augustine Academy in Ventura. These events made me grateful for the many wonderful friends I have made in this work, and very hopeful that Angela and hundreds of thousands of others of the class of 2043 will look back fondly on joyful and fruitful experiences of learning. 

At the Boethius Institute, we are doing all we can to bring this hope to reality. This includes encouraging a spirit of leisure in learning, which Josef Pieper famously considered The Basis of Culture. In that spirit, we are honored to feature articles from Sadie Hoyt of Classical Encounters, who encourages us to “make time for contemplative encounters with beautiful art”, and Colleen Hutt, Director of Literary Evangelization (I love this title!) for Well-Read Mom, who writes about “The Transformative Power of Leisure and Literature”.

As I’ve mentioned before, in a particular way we are working to tap into the tremendous power that mathematics and science have to foster that same spirit. I was delighted when I was invited to give a talk on the role of science in a liberal education for the national classical educators symposium in Tempe, Arizona.  I was able to put a lot of my thoughts together and receive encouragement from the overwhelmingly positive response of the science teachers present. (The recording of the talk will be available at this site in the near future.) 

In the same spirit, I am happy to announce that registration is open for our conference on mathematics which will be held August 6th to the 7th at the Augustine Institute in St. Louis. Our speakers – philosophers, scientists, educational theorists – have thought deeply about the relationship of ancient and modern mathematics and their roles in a life order to wisdom, and have devoted themselves to sharing this with students from middle school through college. 

As I mentioned in our last bulletin, we are grateful to the St. John Henry Newman Institute for their financial support to our work on mathematics and science. Sean Maltbie, Director of Mission and Outreach, said, “The Quadrivium Project of the Boethius Institute is a big vision project that we believe will have a long-term disproportionate effect on the renewal of education. Right now, all we have is bandaid fixes. The Boethius Institute can gather a cadre of people capable of taking a global view and directing concrete applications.” We are looking forward to getting started.

“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.

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:

1. It is about heroes
2. It involves universal settings
3. It involves the supernatural
4. 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.” 

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.

by J. R. R. Tolkien

In this excerpt from The Two Towers, Gimli the Dwarf beautifully evangelizes his friend, Legolas the Elf, about the exquisite beauties he has discovered in a cave of refuge. The scene opens with their troop faced with journeying through a mysterious wood which suddenly appeared to turn the tide of the battle of Helm’s Deep.

In the afternoon the King’s company prepared to depart. The work of burial was then but beginning; and Théoden mourned for the loss of Háma, his captain, and cast the first earth upon his grave. ‘Great injury indeed has Saruman done to me and all this land,’ he said; ‘and I will remember it, when we meet.’

The sun was already drawing near the hills upon the west of the Coomb, when at last Théoden and Gandalf and their companions rode down from the Dike. Behind them were gathered a great host, both of the Riders and of the people of Westfold, old and young, women and children, who had come out from the caves. A song of victory they sang with clear voices; and then they fell silent, wondering what would chance, for their eyes were on the trees and they feared them.

The Riders came to the wood, and they halted; horse and man, they were unwilling to pass in. The trees were grey and menacing, and a shadow or a mist was about them. The ends of their long sweeping boughs hung down like searching fingers, their roots stood up from the ground like the limbs of strange monsters, and dark caverns opened beneath them. But Gandalf went forward, leading the company, and where the road from the Hornburg met the trees they saw now an opening like an arched gate under mighty boughs; and through it Gandalf passed, and they followed him. Then to their amazement they found that the road ran on, and the Deeping-stream beside it; and the sky was open above and full of golden light. But on either side the great aisles of the wood were already wrapped in dusk, stretching away into impenetrable shadows; and there they heard the creaking and groaning of boughs, and far cries, and a rumour of wordless voices, murmuring angrily. No Orc or other living creature could be seen.

Legolas and Gimli were now riding together upon one horse; and they kept close beside Gandalf, for Gimli was afraid of the wood. ‘It is hot in here,’ said Legolas to Gandalf. ‘I feel a great wrath about me. Do you not feel the air throb in your ears?’

‘Yes,’ said Gandalf.

‘What has become of the miserable Orcs?’ said Legolas.

‘That, I think, no one will ever know,’ said Gandalf.

They rode in silence for a while; but Legolas was ever glancing from side to side, and would often have halted to listen to the sounds of the wood, if Gimli had allowed it.

‘These are the strangest trees that ever I saw,’ he said; ‘and I have seen many an oak grow from acorn to ruinous age. I wish that there were leisure now to walk among them: they have voices, and in time I might come to understand their thought.’

‘No, no!’ said Gimli. ‘Let us leave them! I guess their thought already: hatred of all that go on two legs; and their speech is of crushing and strangling.’

‘Not of all that go on two legs,’ said Legolas. ‘There I think you are wrong. It is Orcs that they hate. For they do not belong here and know little of Elves and Men. Far away are the valleys where they sprang. From the deep dales of Fangorn, Gimli, that is whence they come, I guess.’

‘Then that is the most perilous wood in Middle-earth,’ said Gimli. ‘I should be grateful for the part they have played, but I do not love them. You may think them wonderful, but I have seen a greater wonder in this land, more beautiful than any grove or glade that ever grew: my heart is still full of it. ‘Strange are the ways of Men, Legolas! Here they have one of the marvels of the Northern World, and what do they say of it? Caves, they say! Caves! Holes to fly to in time of war, to store fodder in! My good Legolas, do you know that the caverns of Helm’s Deep are vast and beautiful? There would be an endless pilgrimage of Dwarves, merely to gaze at them, if such things were known to be. Aye indeed, they would pay pure gold for a brief glance!’

‘And I would give gold to be excused,’ said Legolas; ‘and double to be let out, if I strayed in!’

‘You have not seen, so I forgive your jest,’ said Gimli. ‘But you speak like a fool. Do you think those halls are fair, where your King dwells under the hill in Mirkwood, and Dwarves helped in their making long ago? They are but hovels compared with the caverns I have seen here: immeasurable halls, filled with an everlasting music of water that tinkles into pools, as fair as Kheled-zâram in the starlight.

‘And, Legolas, when the torches are kindled and men walk on the sandy floors under the echoing domes, ah! then, Legolas, gems and crystals and veins of precious ore glint in the polished walls; and the light glows through folded marbles, shell-like, translucent as the living hands of Queen Galadriel. There are columns of white and saffron and dawn-rose, Legolas, fluted and twisted into dreamlike forms; they spring up from many-coloured floors to meet the glistening pendants of the roof: wings, ropes, curtains fine as frozen clouds; spears, banners, pinnacles of suspended palaces! Still lakes mirror them: a glimmering world looks up from dark pools covered with clear glass; cities. such as the mind of Durin could scarce have imagined in

his sleep, stretch on through avenues and pillared courts, on into the dark recesses where no light can come. And plink! a silver drop falls, and the round wrinkles in the glass make all the towers bend and waver like weeds and corals in a grotto of the sea. Then evening comes: they fade and twinkle out; the torches pass on into another chamber and another dream. There is chamber after chamber, Legolas; hall opening out of hall, dome after dome, stair beyond stair; and still the winding paths lead on into the mountains’ heart. Caves! The Caverns of Helm’s Deep! Happy was the chance that drove me there! It makes me weep to leave them.’

‘Then I will wish you this fortune for your comfort, Gimli,’ said the Elf, ‘that you may come safe from war and return to see them again. But do not tell all your kindred! There seems little left for them to do, from your account. Maybe the men of this land are wise to say little: one family of busy dwarves with hammer and chisel might mar more than they made.’

‘No, you do not understand,’ said Gimli. ‘No dwarf could be unmoved by such loveliness. None of Durin’s race would mine those caves for stones or ore, not if diamonds and gold could be got there. Do you cut down groves of blossoming trees in the spring-time for firewood? We would tend these glades of flowering stone, not quarry them. With cautious skill, tap by tap – a small chip of rock and no more, perhaps, in a whole anxious day – so we could work, and as the years went by, we should open up new ways, and display far chambers that are still dark, glimpsed only as a void beyond fissures in the rock. And lights, Legolas! We should make lights, such lamps as once shone in Khazaddûm; and when we wished we would drive away the night that has lain there since the hills were made; and when we desired rest, we would let the night return.’

‘You move me, Gimli,’ said Legolas. ‘I have never heard you speak like this before. Almost you make me regret that I have not seen these caves. Come! Let us make this bargain-if we both return safe out of the perils that await us, we will journey for a while together. You shall visit Fangorn with me, and then I will come with you to see Helm’s Deep.’

‘That would not be the way of return that I should choose,’ said Gimli. ‘But I will endure Fangorn, if I have your promise to come back to the caves and share their wonder with me.’

‘You have my promise,’ said Legolas. ‘But alas! Now we must leave behind both cave and wood for a while: See! We are coming to the end of the trees. How far is it to Isengard, Gandalf?’

‘About fifteen leagues, as the crows of Saruman make it.’ said Gandalf: ‘five from the mouth of Deeping-coomb to the Fords: and ten more from there to the gates of Isengard. But we shall not ride all the way this night.’

‘And when we come there, what shall we see?’ asked Gimli. ‘You may know, but I cannot guess.’

‘I do not know myself for certain,’ answered the wizard. ‘I was there at nightfall yesterday, but much may have happened since. Yet I think that you will not say that the journey was in vain – not though the Glittering Caves of Aglarond be left behind.’

by Eva Brann
Reprinted with permission from The Imaginative Conservative. See the full essay here.

Author’s Note: I wish to dedicate this essay to a writer of books whose greatness is at once utterly at home in America and quite without spatio-temporal boundaries, Marilynne Robinson, who produces in reality the images I only analyze, and thereby not only saves but augments the tradition I love—the aboriginal imaginative conservative, one who celebrates the glory of the commonplace.

When Winston Elliott invited me to become a Senior Contributor to The Imaginative Conservative I had misgivings. “Is this an honor honestly come by?” I asked myself. Am I a conservative, true blue and staunch? A conservative at all? Would a political conservative have twice voted for our current president, and for my reasons? Because he could speak both in the faith-borne periods of a black preacher and the consideringly correct paragraphs of a Harvard professor. Because he was physically graceful and young. (My disapproving conservative friends claim I fell in love with his ears—and I had no deniability.) Because he was half-black (a way of putting it that suppresses, absurdly, that he is half-white) and I felt this to be great cause for national pride. But, then again, that I thought he was a pragmatic crypto-conservative (in which I turned out to be half-wrong, though all too right if you ask his Left). And because nothing has more eroded my political conservatism than the mulish obstructionism he’s met with in the Far Right, that miserable simulacrum of conservatism.¹[1]

Yet, “imaginative conservative” does just about describe me. Let me put “political” conservatism aside for a–long–moment. Later I’ll want to show why an “imaginative” conservative might be all over the political map, as occasion arises: right, center, left–reactionary (disgustedly oppositional), moderate (prudently dithering), and radical (exuberantly reformist).

So, as always in life, having found the phrase that wins my adherence, it’s time to figure out what it means. What’s “imaginative?” What’s “conservative?” And how does the adjective modify the noun and the noun support its adjective? For my basic assumption is that—let other persuasions appeal to bleeding hearts, Christian conscience, or political realism—a conservative should have, first of all, recourse to self-awareness, mindfulness, reflection. One last confession before I get to it: none of the subjoined lucubrations are anything but second editions, so to speak, recollections and rephrasings of thoughts thought and re-thought over the decades. But perhaps that is in itself a sort of conservatism—to allow one’s convictions to modify and self-reform, but not to be given to swoops and loops and U-turns.

…

Eleventh: Imagination

In my penultimate consideration, I come to the term closest to my heart—imaginative, for me the dominant term in this phrase “imaginative conservative;” I’m a conservative primarily because this adjective, I’ll claim, correctly modifies its noun, though the converse also has its force: imaginativeness tends towards conservatism. For example, imagination gives political ideas their concreteness and forestalls, to some degree, unintended consequences. You have a cure-all program: tell me in concretely imagined detail how it will work out in real life, and also where you may get exactly what you don’t want. That takes imagination of the literal sort I’m about to lay out. I was talking to a sympathetic friend about this essay, and by way of keeping me from one-sidedness, he said: “But the others [liberals, he meant] also have imagination.” “For instance?” I said. “Well, they envision a better world, a world free of… [a litany of ills].” We both began to laugh, because neither of us could see a thing—neither anyone’s real land (there being some three-hundred plus countries, as I recall), nor any specific desire (there being an infinity of those), nor any concrete plan (with escape routes). These goodhearted wishings were not imaginations but ideations, resulting in “ideas,” bright ones. Once, long ago, “idea” did indeed connote ultimate repleteness; now it mostly means mental fixation on a gift-wrapped thought-package.

At this near-last moment, I ought to define the conservatism whose imaginativeness I have wanted to analyze. Definition is dictionary business, and I often have recourse to Partridge’s Origins (an etymological dictionary), in part because he’s not overscrupulous about morphological fact, but very attached to what words mean or meant to their speakers. So: con– is an intensifier to servare, Latin for “to keep safe.” Conservatives, then, are people deeply concerned with preserving, with keeping things safe. I go on from there: because they know things worthy of safekeeping; the implication here is that there might be a kind of conservatism attached to unworthy preservation, or to holding on for the sake of holding on. To some degree, hold-outs are, as I’ve said, to be respected, first, because it is the way of the world that what goes round comes round and what seems retrograde this day may be progressive another day. But more importantly, these folks try to protect stability, and without stability the soul goes blindly shallow with anxious hustle, and the imagination fails in the face of a life oscillating between fast-forward and rewind. That is not to deny that being dug in can also be grave-like and suffer its own obliviousness. Some kinds of conservatives can only chant destructive slogans; the living sense is gone; reactionary movements are the clattering dance of the dead.

The bridge, a long one, between past and present is memory—the memory bridge is a figure for my more literal claim above, that memory is all the past there is. Along this long bridge, some of the past worth saving may, by a misapplication of the memory-mode called memorizing, be turned into sallow ghosts, thence into petrified effigies; the latter particularly in our public or external memory. Similarly, moving thoughts can become rigid abstractions (as in philosophy textbooks that trade in “isms,” idealism, realism, rationalism, empiricism, etc., etc.). Poignant visions can become inert abridgments (as in those infamous Study Notes students don’t admit to using.)² This whole educational cemetery is laid out, I think, according to misguided notions concerning the afterlife of human works, the most acute case of wrongheadedness being that so-called delivery systems are separable from their content, that the concrete specificity of the original texts (in which I include responsible translations) is not inextricably involved in what is said, and that our students’ fictional or philosophical imagination can be aroused by informational abstractions. Derivates are not only failure-prone in finance.

Now to that imagination itself. It is a power and has products. Our souls imagine and bring about works, works of two sorts, mental imagery and external images. Most external images, verbal, visual, even auditory are—the ins and outs of this would be worthy of a big book—imitations of interior imagery, although some external images have no internal originals. (Example: conceptual art; some artists [egged on by their estheticians] claim to visualize only as they are drawing, that is, ex post facto; so they are not imitating psychic pictures but originating manual gestures. Some people say they relish such productions.)

There is behind this account of the imagination a deeper view of the soul, called “epistemological,” that is, “giving an account of knowledge.” In this account, which has ancient and modern versions, imagination has a Hermes-like function. (Hermes, recall, is the conductor-god who transfers souls from earth to the underworld.) Thus the imagination takes delivery from the senses, which give us the world in its solidity and gravity, and rarifies their content into transparent weightless images (sometimes taking these even further down to the mere schemata, the idea-diagrams just mentioned) until they are fit to be presented to the intellect—de-materialized, quasi-spatial presences, on which the mind can think, or, in neuro-peak, which the brain can further process.³

Images themselves have a wonderful ontology, mentioned above and implied in my description of image-formation. They are and are not what they represent. Pull a picture from your wallet and say, “That’s my grandson.” If I responded, “No, it isn’t,” I’d be infuriating, but I wouldn’t be wrong. For an analysis of image-nature yields that very melding of Being and Non-being which so attracts and astounds the intellect attempting to think comprehensively: An image is a present absence—or an absent presence. It is a mystery of disincarnation, of which the willing mind, cunningly compromising its logical requirements, just manages to take hold.⁴ (Cognitive science and neuroscience provide explanations of mental imagery that are more sharp-edged but less illuminating in my context.)

Memory, the imaginative conservative’s special domain (since, as I claimed above, it makes the past have being and the present vitality), is the imagination’s supply house and workspace, for imaginative material is, I would say, basically memorial; who can imagine anything, even a futuristic prospect, that is not a modification of the past?

The imagination, then, is the worker within this memorial store; it transmutes, transfigures, and transforms memories. Sometimes it falsifies, but I think that in its invention it is less liar than interpreter. I’ll put it this way: the well-conditioned imagination is a myth-recalling and myth-making imagination. It puts a background of meaning to present experience. Human meaningfulness almost always has, I think, a sense of depth to it, which in memorial space acquires the feel of “out of the past.”

So it’s time to meditate on the sources of memory. There are basic external origins, of course, sensory experiences and their evaluations—reality-derived memories. Among these are external images, crafted by painters and other visual artists or developed by cameras and other recording devices, snapshot-style or posed, unretouched or doctored, intended as honest testimony or passed out with a deceitful agenda—true or lying imitations.

And then there are internal images, imaginative images, effects of the productive imagination working on its psychic material. And these images of the soul raise the most acutely wonderful of all questions concerning the imagination: What are the originals of imaginative images? Whence comes the material that the working imagination contributes on its own, drawing on presences not found in experiential, this-worldly memory? Most quasi-sensory elements of inner images must, for such as we are, indeed be world-derived. But there are beings, events, atmospheres that have never yet eventuated in this world, or at least were never within our sensory reach. When poets and novelists make them external for us (and we in turn internalize them) we call them fictions, but falsely, because we may find them more actual than merely real facts.

The question concerning the originals of imaginative images is, I think, ultimately theological. Explanations in terms of the sub- or unconscious are subterfuges—no one can actually locate these limbos; explaining away is not explaining. When I say “theological,” I have in mind the Muses who live on Olympus and are invoked by poets from Homer to Milton, who both had access to the realm of divinity, where the Muses are quartered. So also great novelists express, more prosaically, some sense of being visited from Beyond. And it is no accident that the greatest phenomenologist (that is, an account-giver of inner appearances, in this case of memory and imagination, in his Confessions) was also among the greatest theologians, namely Augustine of Hippo (354-430). In sum, the originals of memories are mostly external and come to us largely through the frontal doors of perception, but the originals of the imagination on its own are imparted—who knows whence?—to some hinterland of the soul—which, once again, it’s no use to call the unconscious, for if it’s just neural, how does it issue as “conscious,” and if it’s conscious, how is it “un?”

So much for the ontology, activity, sources, and originals of the imagination; as I said, a culpably condensed treatment worth a big book.⁵ And now, one last time: Why is the imagination a specifically conservative concern so that it is rightly attached adjectivally to the noun “conservative?”

The imagination should be anybody’s interest, a common interest, for just as articulateness damps rage, so imaginativeness relieves alienation. Thus, as the preservation of expressive (non-twittering) language should be a social concern, the saving of the imagination should be everyone’s care. I will argue below for the implication that nothing matters more to our psychological security than the protection of children from degraded speech and vulgarized images.

What are the dangers? First, the outsourcing of the imagination, the riffing, as it were, of the in-house working imagination, to be replaced by the inundating hyper-productivity of an industrial image-source. Next, the loss of worldly originals, particularly the paving over of nature, the systematic replacement of what is given to us, is of slow growth, is deep and mysterious, by what is made by us, is quickly produced, and is complex and so completely analyzable—without being at all understood. The practical business of resisting the transmogrification of first into second nature belongs to those uncomfortable kin of conservatives, the conservationists; they are lately learning not to ride rough-shod over people’s livelihoods in their enthusiasm and to find mutually satisfactory accommodations, so that conservation can become a win-win game—in the conservative mode, one might say, chuckling.

A final slew of dangers I can think of is the concentration of physical vision into the field of a miniscule window, where occurs “texting” with its digital modes: literal fingering, calculational figuring, verbal frittering. Concurrently, imaginative visioning is overwhelmed by image-inundation, and keen intellectual appetite is spoiled by a surfeit of information.⁶

But then, what’s all this to the imaginative conservative in particular? Well, we ought to be glad and close observers of all givenness, green nature above all, great sniffers-out of the corrosive vapors issuing from the excessive ingestion of the original world, the world that is, for faith, God’s creation, or for philosophy, Being’s appearance. Another way to put it: Imaginative conservatism means, to me at least, a grounded flexibility functioning between ideal and real, the imaginative space in which concrete specificity and universal essentiality meet—the twice-lived world, once in experienced fact and again in imaginative reflection.

Twelfth: Eccentric Centrality

Finally, an imaginative conservative will have, against all odds, an abiding faith in eccentric centrality. A nun I used to know once explained to me that the energy which moves the world has its center in out-of-the-way places, remote from the mere epicenters of secular power. I agree. The spirit lives in the sticks, in backwaters, small towns, in self-sufficiently recalcitrant, contentedly unregarded places, in local orchestras, neighborhood groceries, in libraries that still have books on shelves—not multiple copies of best-sellers but accumulated collections of middlingly good novels—and, above all, in face-to-face schools that transmit the tradition, its treasures of beauty and of reflection. Of course, they all must scramble, accommodate themselves to “current conditions”—a potently polymorphous notion, the correct discerning of which takes more practical wisdom than most of us possess. Thus the imaginative conservative’s practical project is survival without loss of soul.

So that’s the imaginative conservative I’m willing to own up to being—call it “modified Burkean,” if it’s better off with a label.⁷ Do I then have “the Conservative Mind?” I hope not. A mind-set is a major liability for a person wanting to be thoughtful—and a premature fixative of imaginative reflection to boot.

In fact, it is legitimate history to claim that an imaginative—let it be said, a Burkean—conservative will be politically a classical Liberal in the nineteenth-century English sense: of Lockean ancestry, believing in the ultimacy of individuals over groups; ready to trust elected representatives with projects for political reform but resistant to administrative compulsions of social justice; attached to private associations as loci of excellence; and, above all, cherishing liberty over the forcible equality of ideological egalitarianism—as opposed to the equality grounded in our common nature or creation. This is the merest sketch of a politics that seems to me compatible with imaginative conservatism.

My first and last care, however, is not politics (a late-learned duty) but education (an abiding passion). Education seems to me inherently conservative, being the transmission, and thus the saving, of a tradition’s treasures of fiction and thought. (I can’t think the desperately “innovative” gimmickry which diverts attention from contents to delivery systems is able to reconstitute failing communities of learning.)

But education is also inherently imaginative, because from pre-school to graduate school, it consists, or should consist, primarily of learning to read books (in whatever format), books of words, symbols, diagrams, musical notes. For entry into all of these, but perhaps books of words above all, imagination is indispensable. Great poetry requires visualization to be interpretable; the word has to become a vision to be realized. (Specific example, perhaps the greatest moment of any: at the climax of the Iliad, Achilles is searching for the vulnerable spot in Hector’s armor-encased body. The armor Hector is wearing is the suit he has stripped from the body of Patroclus, the friend of Achilles’ heart, whom Achilles has sent heedlessly into battle to fight in his stead, clothed in his own armor. Now he drives his spear into Hector’s gullet. Whom is he killing? Homer is silent. See it and shudder.)

Similarly, works of reflection require a kind of reverse imagination, since practically all speech about non-physical being is by bodily metaphor: The transfiguration, the transcending, of such philosophical figures is practically the same as thinking reflectively. (A not so very specific an example, but perhaps among the grandest: Hegel tells of the Spirit coming into time, of God entering the world, through a “gallery of figures,” human incarnations, even identifiable as historical individuals. But, he says, that’s not how we are to understand his Phenomenology of Spirit, meaning his account of the phenomena by which divinity becomes manifest in the world; he is not presenting imagined figures but incarnate truths. It is the most hellishly difficult but most rewarding of image-interpretations known to me; it requires ascending from visualizable images to purely thinkable originals.)

That’s imaginative conservatism for a college and its students, my particular venue and charge. But what matters most is, as I must repeat, the education of children. Looking at them from the vantage point of their future teacher, I would wish this for us: that their memories be stocked with the finest products of the tradition and their minds be—gently—turned toward the outside in close looking and articulate verbalizing and toward the inside in absorbed reading and ready visualizing. Just forget for a while about “preparing them for tomorrow” and “for being productive members of today’s society”—all that routine drivel deserves scare quotes since it’s meant to turn us into sacrificial victims on the altar of utility. It doesn’t work anyhow, since tomorrow is anybody’s guess and actual producing may be by then passé. And while I’m at it: Teach children mathematics for what it is, not dreary, opaquely operational formulas, but the most immediately intelligible language in which Nature speaks to us—and the spare armature of our vision-invested imagination.

All of this can happen if schools for all ages stay resolutely local in place and go expansively cosmopolitan in time. I mean that they should preserve themselves as face-to-face communities in particular places, but dedicate themselves to absorbing living heritage from any time. For the present is too thin to live on, and the future too inexistent.

1 “Simulacrum” because “conservative” practically means “moderate”—or should. I’m speaking here of an obtusely aggressive public persona, not of the understandably aggrieved human souls who have donned it; in some respects I sympathize with them.

6. Though they too have a place—as indexes to very long novels.

7. Such as logic and mathematical diagrams which appear, it seems, in a blank internal imaginative field in which reason—how is a mystery—can inscribe its structures. There are, of course, also external images produced by nature, such as reflections.

8. I want to distinguish sharply the Non-being constitutionally inherent in images from virtuality, which is a discretionary mode of reception, hence, as I said, a danger. More accurately, virtuality is an environment, “the virtual world.” When the promise of this virtual world to come is fulfilled, it will divorce its—presumably still voluntary—participants pretty finally (if only in stretches) from the physical world; they will be cocooned in a world-simulacrum that is absolutely immediate, without intervening organs of sensation or physical distances—achieved by direct electronic stimulation of the brain that subserves our perceptions. It will be a complete environment, a replacement world, without reality-resistance and therefore completely manipulable—by the individual for his own pleasure or by the technological provider with alien motives: inactuality as world-principle—otherwise put, an image-world humanly contrived without originals. Here the wondrous element of Non-being is turned against the very images it sustained as images, caused to be images; in the virtual world, not only have mental images cast loose from originals, but instead of being within us, we are within them, as in a super-mind.

9. As Milton’s Satan says, “The mind is its own place, and in itself / Can make a Heaven of Hell, a Hell of Heaven.” Hell, I would think. In sum, virtuality is a term from the devil’s dictionary, a good word, “virtue,” gone ambiguous as in “virtual reality,” potently unreal reality. Conservationists of the imagination should think twice. This term has suction power.

10. See E. Brann, The World of the Imagination (1991).
Here is an omen: The number of visitors to our national parks is on a downward trend; the reason given is in a headline: “Why go outside when you have an iPhone?” (Economist August 17, 2013).

11. Here’s what’s “Burkean.” Edmund Burke (1729-97) is for reform that is not ideologically driven; he is radical when reason-sustained popular opinion requires it (Burke was a supporter of our Revolution); he’s for minimum moralism and conciliatory politics out of respect for tradition  and care for stability; he pays deference both to Nature and historical conditions; he supports incremental change and the narrowest tailoring of planned interventions. He’s not for philosophy, mistaking it, I think, for rationalism (or maybe just being an Englishman of a traditional cast of mind)—that’s where my revisionism comes in: I’m for Burke plus philosophy. And certainly, if conservatives may, on occasion, be divided into Burkeans and bullies, I’ll declare for the former.

1. “Simulacrum” because “conservative” practically means “moderate”—or should. I’m speaking here of an obtusely aggressive public persona, not of the understandably aggrieved human souls who have donned it; in some respects I sympathize with them. ↩︎
2. Though they too have a place—as indexes to very long novels. ↩︎
3. Such as logic and mathematical diagrams which appear, it seems, in a blank internal imaginative field in which reason—how is a mystery—can inscribe its structures. There are, of course, also external images produced by nature, such as reflections. ↩︎
4. I want to distinguish sharply the Non-being constitutionally inherent in images from virtuality, which is a discretionary mode of reception, hence, as I said, a danger. More accurately, virtuality is an environment, “the virtual world.” When the promise of this virtual world to come is fulfilled, it will divorce its—presumably still voluntary—participants pretty finally (if only in stretches) from the physical world; they will be cocooned in a world-simulacrum that is absolutely immediate, without intervening organs of sensation or physical distances—achieved by direct electronic stimulation of the brain that subserves our perceptions. It will be a complete environment, a replacement world, without reality-resistance and therefore completely manipulable—by the individual for his own pleasure or by the technological provider with alien motives: inactuality as world-principle—otherwise put, an image-world humanly contrived without originals. Here the wondrous element of Non-being is turned against the very images it sustained as images, caused to be images; in the virtual world, not only have mental images cast loose from originals, but instead of being within us, we are within them, as in a super-mind.
   As Milton’s Satan says, “The mind is its own place, and in itself / Can make a Heaven of Hell, a Hell of Heaven.” Hell, I would think. In sum, virtuality is a term from the devil’s dictionary, a good word, “virtue,” gone ambiguous as in “virtual reality,” potently unreal reality. Conservationists of the imagination should think twice. This term has suction power. ↩︎
5. See E. Brann, The World of the Imagination (1991). ↩︎
6. Here is an omen: The number of visitors to our national parks is on a downward trend; the reason given is in a headline: “Why go outside when you have an iPhone?” (Economist August 17, 2013). ↩︎
7. Here’s what’s “Burkean.” Edmund Burke (1729-97) is for reform that is not ideologically driven; he is radical when reason-sustained popular opinion requires it (Burke was a supporter of our Revolution); he’s for minimum moralism and conciliatory politics out of respect for tradition  and care for stability; he pays deference both to Nature and historical conditions; he supports incremental change and the narrowest tailoring of planned interventions. He’s not for philosophy, mistaking it, I think, for rationalism (or maybe just being an Englishman of a traditional cast of mind)—that’s where my revisionism comes in: I’m for Burke plus philosophy. And certainly, if conservatives may, on occasion, be divided into Burkeans and bullies, I’ll declare for the former. ↩︎

by Jean Guerreiro, Fellow

After High School in 2017, I received an invitation to apply to a six month program in Porto Alegre, Brazil, called ‘Intensive Program of Liberal Arts’ through my literature teacher in the local public school that I attended. I had never heard of liberal arts, but I saw that the Institute had multiple online courses on the Liberal Arts, and thousands of students around the nation. These students were all enrolled there not for professional training, resume building, or even for a diploma to get a job. They were studying Latin, Greek, literature, logic, among other subjects. I was surprised to realize that Instituto Hugo de São Vitor was not the only institution working towards the promotion of an educational renewal, a coming back to the classics, in Brazil. They were a part of a greater movement for the restoration of the pursuit of truth. 

As I was born in a small town in Brazil and went to a public school all my life, classical education was not in the radar for me or my family. Reading wasn’t a habit of mine, nor did I see why it would be. Little did I know that I would fall in love with classical education so deeply, that helping to restore education here has been in the forefront of my mind ever since.

I did go to Porto Alegre and lived there for six months, studying Latin, Greek, logic, and literature. It was like a rebirth to me. I didn’t have an appreciation for the higher things of culture such as music, literature, and art, and also was in complete oblivion of the fact that learning could be for its own sake. I loved it thoroughly and there was no coming back after such an experience. In 2018, I went to Thomas Aquinas College in its California campus, and was a member of the first graduating class of the New England campus, which opened its doors in 2019. 

My experience at Thomas Aquinas College was so rich that I could not help but try to share that with my fellow countrymen. During the summer between my sophomore and junior year, I tried to recruit students from Brazil to come to TAC, as I saw that this experience was very far from anything that anyone could achieve in Brazil. Thanks be to God, there were five students who got accepted to the College and were set to come that fall. An idea, then, came to my mind and I started co-teaching and co-organizing a program with another Brazilian student from the California campus to help these students, and others, to prepare for Thomas Aquinas College. That is when I started teaching online courses on the Great Books using the Socratic method. 

After my graduation in 2022, more and more students were seeking to pursue independent studies reading the Great Books with me. What was even more surprising: the students who started coming were not only the ones who were preparing to come to TAC, they were engineers, college professors, teachers, lawyers, among others. I have been teaching online and in person programs on the great books, attempting to give a taste of what I received at TAC with Aristotelian logic, Euclid, literature, natural science, amongst other programs. The students are grateful and only want to get more and more, and that is rewarding. 

But, teaching was not my primary occupation after graduation. I began working for the office of admissions on the New England campus of TAC, and was able to travel through many different states visiting many great Catholic schools, such as the Lyceum, Immaculata Classical Academy, Chesterton Academies, Gregory the Great Academy, amongst many others. These schools would allow me to speak to all of their students about liberal education, and why it was a natural follow up to the classical education they were receiving. Besides these trips, I got to know and speak to many fellow Brazilians who wanted to take their educations to the next level and make the jump to attempt to come to the U.S. and attend TAC. The experience of working in admissions only increased my love of Thomas Aquinas College, and its view of Catholic Liberal Education. 

Since then I have come back to Brazil and been more immersed in the classical renewal. I have been impressed by the amount of people who have been searching for such an endeavor. As a matter of fact, there are nine Brazilians currently attending Thomas Aquinas College, along with six alumni and over a dozen of applicants. This might be seen as a small number compared to the vast population of over 212 million people that Brazil boasts. But, going to TAC is the culmination of something much greater that has been happening in the past decade in the country. It is worth noting that the Brazilians who have gone to TAC have undergone multiple sacrifices in order to make it work – all to receive a true education.

How it all began, and who are the most important figures in this educational renewal, I cannot claim to know fully. But, certainly there were important teachers who influenced beyond the classroom. Some who deserve mentioning are Olavo de Carvalho, Padre Paulo Ricardo and José Munir Nasser. Olavo was a conservative teacher and writer. He founded a program called ‘COF’, which stands for Online Philosophy Course in Portuguese. The course boasts of 585 recorded classes on the various subjects of philosophy, without any particular school of thought being followed. The focus was on forming conservative thinkers. The course has taught more than 80,000 students. Many others deserve mentioning here, such as a priest called Padre Paulo Ricardo – a priest who is similar in many ways to Venerable Fulton Sheen in his work and popularity-  who has been responsible for an incredible number of conversions to the true faith in the country. José Munir Nasser also had a tremendous impact. He taught a five year humanities program very similar to John Senior’s, amongst many other great figures who contributed to this renewal. 

Nowadays, there are three different fronts that the classical renewal has taken: families starting Catholic schools, homeschooling, and independent learning and study of liberal arts and philosophy, mostly online.  Over a hundred Catholic schools have been starting in the previous five years in Brazil. While it is difficult to provide a true education without the previous formation of teachers and principals, the movement has been focusing on trying to do their best to educate their children in the light of the faith. This movement is very hungry for true formation, and is docile to learning from others. Homeschooling is becoming more and more of an option for families with a desire to remove their children from the woke ideologies presented in the schools. This is worth noting, because despite homeschooling being illegal in Brazil, parents are truly sacrificing their freedom to try to educate their children in the light of the classical curriculum. On the side of adults, there are thousands of students pursuing the truth. The truth that they felt was denied them while they were at school. There are many teachers around the country who are extremely influential, with thousands of students themselves. What do they teach? The classical liberal arts and philosophy. 

Beyond that, we have many people making remarkable progress in spending time for a solid formation. A couple of friends deserve mentioning. There is Rodrigo Ribeiro, who is now a tutor at Thomas Aquinas College and has a strong aspiration to help in the educational renewal in Brazil, but only after receiving many years of experience at the College. Marcus Porto went to Vivarium Novum in Italy, learned Latin fluently, attended TAC and was a distinguished student, and then went on to a masters in classics in Greek and Latin at Kentucky University. Lucas Fonseca – another fellow in the Boethius Fellowship – after studying law decided to take on philosophy as his passion, learned Latin fluently at Vivarium and now teaches the liberal arts in Latin and tutors teachers around the country, as well as getting his masters online at University of Dallas. Many others around the country are united in seeking the best education they can, in order to provide for the true education of others. 

From the numbers of converts to a more serious approach to the faith and to learning arising in every little town and state in the country, one can see easily that Brazil is going through a classical renewal in its education. Is it in the mainstream? Not at all. Not yet. From what I can tell, though, – and I am no prophet – there is hope for the future here. I don’t know if the movement will be able to be strong enough to overcome the strength of the other side, but we know we are on the winning side in the end, and so we keep fighting the good fight, hoping for the crown of victory at the end.