Notes and Quotes

* I am often asked if Paideia requires its teachers to hold a state certification of education. The short answer is, "no". The longer answer is that what the state maintains a good teacher to be is not what we believe a good teacher to be. We require that our teachers 1.) love the Lord, 2.) love teaching, 3.) love children, and 4.) love their subject matter. While I could expound on all four of these requirements, it is it the fourth one that our Contemplatio reading for these week draws upon. One way to truly love one's subject is to continually go deeper through reading and studying it. Mr. Capps, our upper school classical language instructor, has collected quotations and made notes on one of his recent readings entitled Climbing Parnassus: A New Apology for Greek and Latin. Since our unique little school is committed to the study of classical languages, I have made a few of these notes available for your review here. Should you desire a deeper experience, the book is available in the office for your use.

Notes and Quotes from Climbing Parnassus: A New Apologia for Greek and Latin

Author ~ Tracy Lee Simmons

Editor ~ Kent Capps

C. S. Lewis: “Beauty is not democratic; she reveals herself more to the few than to the many, more to the persistent and disciplined seekers than to the careless. Virtue is not democratic; she is achieved by those who pursue her more hotly than most men. Truth is not democratic; she demands special talents and special industry in those to whom she gives her favours. Political democracy is doomed if it tries to extend its demands for equality into these higher spheres. Ethical, intellectual, or aesthetic democracy is death” (33).

Richard Livingstone: “The most indispensible viaticum for the journey of life is a store of adequate ideals, and these are acquired in a very simple way, by living with the best things in the world—the best pictures, the best buildings, the best social or political orders, the best human beings. The way to acquire a good taste in anything, from pictures to architecture, from literature to character, from wine to cigars, is always the same—be familiar with the best specimens of each” (44).

Simmons: “Education should preserve and transmit the past so that cultural memory is lengthened, and so that descendants will not be left to rediscover human truths already endured and expressed by eloquent forbears” (66).

Simmons: “When aims are pitched high, even a partial failure may lead to ultimate success. The climb itself builds muscles, even if we don’t reach the top” (81).

Simmons: Vittorino “held that nature had not fit all people for learning. To get the most out of study, one needed not simply capacity for learning, but a “taste” for it; learning ought not to be forced upon a student unequal to its rigors and intellectual largesse” (99).

Erasmus to Thomas More’s Daughter (Supposedly): “You are an eloquent Latinist, Margaret, but, if you would drink deeply of the well-springs of wisdom, apply to Greek. The Latins have only shallow rivulets; the Greeks, copious rivers running over sands of gold” (112).

Richard Gummere on Influences to the United States: “It is fair to say that Plutarch was to the rebellion what Cicero was to the Declaration, and Aristotle and Polybius to the Constitution” (132).

Thomas Arnold: “The study of language seems to me as if it was given for the very purpose of forming the human mind in youth; and the Greek and Latin languages, in themselves so perfect, and at the same time freed from the insuperable difficulty which must attend any attempt to teach boys philology through the medium of their own spoken language, seem the very instruments by which this is to be effected” (142).

Simmons on Edmund Warre’s Commitment to the Reading of Homer: “Not only did he [Homer] offer snappy, engaging narratives amenable to schoolboys and spinsters alike, but he also conveyed rare lyrical beauty. His seemed a voice from the morning of civilization. To read Homer was to discover a new country different enough to provide escape but familiar enough over time to lend comfort to rainy days. Here was an atmosphere of heroic munificence ranged ‘far on the ringing plains of windy Troy.’ No longer was the payoff for years of sweat over grammar and word lists simply higher thought: Homer said high things beautifully” (146).

Walter Bagehot: “[A] man who has not read Homer is like a man who has not seen the Ocean” (147).

Simmons: “C. S. Lewis . . . said that equality, so valuable as a legal fiction for a just society, still has no place in the life of the mind. Political ideals of equality, Lewis said, may be necessary. But he, like Aristotle before him, drew that valuable distinction between the ‘education which democrats like’ and ‘the education which will preserve democracy.’ For close up they face the world differently. One allows us to recline and feel good about ourselves; the other quickens us, out of a sense of our innate unfitness and incompleteness, to climb above what we are and rise to that which we might become” (153-54).

Simmons on Nock: “Education should not be, as he explained later in his memoirs, a preparation for making a living, but a preparation for living. Education should aim at fostering a certain kind of intellect and a certain kind of human being. It required a lot of time at the blackboard learning things others have judged worthwhile. It involved learning to think well and to appreciate the solid proposition and the well-turned phrase” (157).

Simmons on John Henry Newman: “Most of the plagues assailing the mind, Newman believed, could be traced to a person’s ignorance of Grammar” (163).

Simmons: “Greek and Latin carry in their long wakes an entire world of thought and feeling. But they do more. They give us codes of clarity and fluency. This is as true now as it was in fifteenth-century Italy or nineteenth-century England. Yet it would seem contrary to common sense. Would not a thorough acquaintance with one’s native language do the trick much more efficiently? Surely the best way to learn, say, English is to read and write English? The answer of the ages is simple and direct, though it has rarely satisfied the maniacally literal mind: Greek and Latin were so taught for so many centuries because they were not native. Their very strangeness and dissimilarity to modern languages made them a unique, irreplaceable tool of teaching for those who would comprehend the workings of language en tout. The object was to gain an understanding of words from the inside, affording the learner an intimate familiarity with their separate and diverse natures. Thus could we own language in a new way; we would take it on board. We would learn to be both precise and graceful with the words we use. But as thinkers saw from ancient times till the day before yesterday, precision and grace are not a gift; they wait at the end of an arduous climb. The long way round is the shortest route home” (164-65).

Simmons: “Such effort for the most fortunate of students provides abundant recompense, even though these beneficent results begin with dry, painstaking work. Nil sine magno vita labore dedit mortalibus. Life gives nothing to us without tremendous work and sacrifice” (165).

Simmons: “High thought and deep expression pulsate within language. Livingstone believed that Latin taught those laws better than any other tongue. A thorough training in Latin does encourage mental discipline. It helps us think well. And indeed it helps us to understand English better than we would understand it without Latin. This one-two punch alone should justify its place in any good school” (168).

Seneca: “Non qui parum habet, sed qui plus cupit, pauper est (It isn’t the man who has little, but the man who craves more, who is poor)” (170).

W. H. Auden: “Anybody who has spent many hours in his youth translating into and out of two languages so syntactically and rhetorically different from his own, learns something about his mother tongue which I do not think can be learned in any other way” (183).

Auden: “The people who have really suffered since classical education became ‘undemocratic’ are not the novelists and poets—their natural love of language sees them through—but all those, like politicians, journalists, lawyers, the man-in-the-street, etc., who use language for everyday and nonliterary purposes. Among such one observes an appalling deterioration in precision and conciseness” (184).

Simmons: “How ironic that those democratic fears of ‘elitism’ should ensure that those born without the privileges of the educated classes will remain permanently disabled, victims of others’ good intentions” (184).

Simmons: “As with the Greek and Roman schools so many centuries before, the curriculum of [Evelyn] Waugh’s school was also marked, as H. I. Marrou wrote, by a ‘definite rejection of what it did not include.’ What it didn’t let in was of equal importance to what it did. Any school, we might conclude, with more than four or five subjects doesn’t know what it wants to be—or, we may shudder to think, perhaps it does. Most public schools in America now strive to be cut-rate education malls for the intellectually lame—whether or not students first darken the school doors that way, so most of them leave—while even some private schools pose as little more than colorful felt boards for the earnestly shallow, commonly confusing pious or patriotic piffle with real education. Neither set up makes for a school any educated human being is bound to respect.

“Schools of the best kind have always aimed high while keeping feet to the ground. They didn’t try to do too much; they tried to do the most important things. . . . The old schoolmasters didn’t profess to teach everything worth knowing. Indeed they professed the opposite. They shaped their curricula narrowly and wisely. Information alone is not knowledge, as they knew. Still less is it wisdom. Schools can accomplish much more when they recognize squarely how little they can do. Yet how much more can be done when our gaze remains steady, our head sober, our aims high” (185-86).

Simmons: “The work enjoined upon us should help us to develop, not only by its content but also by its method, the mind capable of teaching itself anything. It’s not so much an informed mind we seek—the one full of ‘information’ for an Information Age, making us little more than worker bees—but a certain quality of mind, a mind at once agile and civilized, one able to place the society to which it belongs into some scheme of history” (186).

C. S. Lewis: “‘The trouble with these boys,’ said a grim old classical scholar looking up from some milk-and-watery entrance papers which he had been marking: “the trouble with these boys is that the masters have been talking to them about the Parthenon when they should have been talking to them about the Optative. . . . Ever since then I have tended to use the Parthenon and the Optative as the symbols of two types of education. The one begins with the hard, dry things like grammar, and dates, and prosody; and it has at least the chance of ending in a real appreciation which is equally hard and firm though not equally dry. The other begins in “Appreciation” and ends in gush. When the first fails it has, at the very least, taught the boy what knowledge is like. He may decide that he doesn’t care for knowledge; but he knows he doesn’t care for it, and he knows he hasn’t got it. But the other fails most disastrously when it most succeeds. It teaches a man to feel vaguely cultured while he remains in fact a dunce. It makes him think he is enjoying poems he can’t construe. It qualifies him to review books he does not understand, and to be intellectual without intellect. It plays havoc with the very distinction between truth and error” (188).

Simmons: “And Lewis, like so many before him, knew that, while the long way round—the Way of the Optative—may not guarantee arrival at the port of our desires, nonetheless it is the one way that weather-hardened, sea-legged mariners have tested and found to be not only reliable but, given the winds tossing us, safe” (191).

Woodrow Wilson on Classics: “We should have scant capital to trade on were we to throw away the wisdom we have inherited and seek our fortunes with the slender stock we ourselves have accumulated. This . . . is the real, the prevalent argument for holding every man we can to the intimate study of the ancient classics,” for “what you cannot find a substitute for is the classics as literature; and there can be no first hand contact with that literature if you will not master the grammar and the syntax which convey its subtle power” (212).

William Howard Taft: Classical studies “are most helpful in the matter of correct English style, in laying sound foundations for grammatical construction, and in furnishing a basis for the study of all modern languages” (212).

Theodore Roosevelt: “Democracy comes short of what it should be just to the extent that it fails to provide for the exceptional individual, no matter how poor his start in life, the highest kind of exceptional training; for democracy as a permanent world force must mean not only the raising of the general level, but also the raising of the standards of excellence to which only exceptional individuals may attain.” So “for those who have the chance and desire” to take “a broad and high liberal education . . . one essential element shall be classical training” (212-13).

Simmons: “Roosevelt lived his creed, maintaining his reading of Greek and Latin amid trust-busting and big game hunting until the end of his life” (213).

Emerson: “Let us not forget that the adoption of the test ‘what is it good for’ would abolish the rose and exalt in triumph the cabbage” (213).

C. S. Lewis: “To lose what I owe to Plato and Aristotle would be like the amputation of a limb. Hardly any lawful price would seem to me too high for what I have gained by being made to learn Latin and Greek” (223).

Andrew Lang: “To forget Homer, to cease to be concerned or even curious about Homer, is to make a fatal step toward a new barbarism” (224).

Somerset Maugham: “[Y]ou can’t imagine what a thrill it is to read the Odyssey in the original. It makes you feel as if you only had to get on tiptoe and stretch out your hand to touch the stars” (224).

G. K. Chesterton: The Iliad “might well be the last word as well as the first word spoken by man about his mortal lot, as seen by merely mortal vision. If the world becomes pagan and perishes, the last man left alive would do well to quote the Iliad and die” (224).

E. K. Rand: “Buy, beg, borrow, or steal enough of a knowledge of Greek to read Homer in the original” (224).

Emerson: “[E]very novel is a debtor to Homer” (224).

Livingstone on the Greek Playwrights (Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides): “Let critics of the classics produce any other civilization so complete, so fitted to introduce [us] to the activities and adventures of the human mind, so able in every direction to open windows on to life” (225).