Dialogue: What Does This Mean?

Transcript (edited for readability).

Thank you very much, Professor Esolen, for instructing us, informing us, and challenging us, and certainly, I think, inspiring us. Thank you very, very much. So we do have some time for some questions before our closing prayer. I'll pass the microphone around. There's a good Lutheran question which comes to us from the catechism: what does this mean? Who would like to lead off?

Thank you, Dr. Esolen. As you were talking, maybe my own reflection would be that something difficult in the church is perhaps our own failure of imagination here. But maybe I'm concerned about another aspect of our modern faith. I know in Rodney Stark's The Rise of Christianity, he talked about how this kind of obscure Jewish offshoot sect rose to prominence over three hundred years, and he mentioned that when the plagues rolled through Europe, the non-believers fled the cities and the Christians stayed and cared for their own and cared for their non-believer neighbors. So there's this incredible element of caring throughout our faith. I wonder, is there a failure of nerve? Is there a failure of courage for Christians today to go into these places, to go into the streets, like you said, into the streets of this new Turin — and how do we reclaim that courage in the church?

Yeah, okay. This kind of jibes with one of the things I believe I alluded to this morning. William Chauncey Langdon, the big American promoter of the YMCA movement, noted that it was a dangerous movement to deprive the family of most of its social and educational functions. He was, in fact — and others of his progressive friends were — suspicious of the Sunday school movement, because again they saw it as a constriction of the family. This, in his mind, went along with a political idea that was prevalent in America but that was ultimately dangerous: the political ideal of equality, and the notion that all good things must come about through organized political action, from city councils and so forth.

So we have, in our imaginations, accepted a false premise — that there is a barrier between the public and the private, or between the public and the personal, between the political, in the sense in which we now use the word (that is, things that have to do with politicians passing laws and so forth), and the real vibrant life of a community, a city. We're all prey to this. We all expect that engines of government should do things. Well, engines of government often do things very badly, because the things that need to be done are human, and are not the results of political machinery, even if the machinery is well oiled and the people who run the machinery are well intended. No political machinery can supply the absence of a father in the home.

Christians now need to get the idea back into their heads that it is not primarily the responsibility of the state to educate the young, or to administer to the sick, or to ameliorate or alleviate the sufferings of the poor. That is principally the domain of ordinary human beings, especially ordinary human beings in their communities of faith. It's easy for us to fall back and say, "Social Security will do it." We've got to scrub that out of our minds and souls, and it's very, very hard to do.

I think Rodney Stark is right about this, though. I wrote a piece for another magazine I write for, Magnificat, a monthly Roman Catholic missalette, on how the church has changed the world through the centuries. The first large-scale infirmary hospital that I can find any trace of was built by Basil the Great in Cappadocia, where poor people who were sick could go and be treated by doctors, or, even if they had something they would die of, could die in peace and comfort, ministered to both body and soul. It was a great, big place. I don't know that it existed before the church did these things. The church invented the university. These things then get taken over by what are now secular arms, but in so many ways they no longer perform the functions for which they were invented in the first place.

We've got to reclaim our spheres of activity and influence, and frankly, we've got to reclaim our responsibility. Christians all need to get it through their heads: this is not the government's responsibility, to educate your child. They don't do a good job. Your kids would be better off at home doing nothing than going to schools full of toxins. Better off doing nothing. Because there are two problems with our schools, other than the social business, which is also a problem — everything the kids don't learn there, and everything they do. Otherwise the schools are fine, except they're basket cases of social insanity — but otherwise they're fine, except they waste many hours of the day and the kids have to ride buses, which are uncomfortable. Otherwise, fine.

And thanks to you, we know where to begin to form our libraries — we go to our town dump. Actually, every single one of your parishes can have a great library on the cheap, because a lot of these things are castoffs, and a lot of great books can be had for almost nothing more than shipping, on eBay. The volumes of the Century magazine I was talking about — my wife gets them for me, I sometimes find them in antique stores, somewhere between five and twenty-five or thirty dollars for six months' worth, about fourteen or fifteen hundred pages of Americana — really great stuff. That's on the expensive end. Most great paperback books of masterpieces can be had in flea markets for a buck. We can have these, and we should have them. You heard it here.

Other questions? If you don't ask questions, I'll be offended — I'll send my boys after you. Italian boys are tough.

Since no one has a loftier question, I'll ask my simple one. You mentioned Shakespeare being like an inoculation for the student. As I homeschool my children, and they love Shakespeare, I wanted to hear you expound your thoughts on that a little more. Are you coming from — I think it's maybe John Donne who said "a little knowledge is a dangerous thing" — is that where you're coming from with that comment?

Alexander Pope. Thank you. "A little learning is a dangerous thing; drink deep, or taste not the Pierian spring: there shallow draughts intoxicate the brain, and drinking largely sobers us again." Is that where you're coming from?

The way students are introduced to Shakespeare in school is pernicious in several different ways. First, since they are not being introduced to the great heritage of English literature, Shakespeare strikes them as speaking an entirely foreign tongue. That's off-putting and obnoxious to them. When these kids have trouble reading Charles Dickens — who is, linguistically, our contemporary — Shakespeare, who is not even what you'd call early modern English but simply modern English (early modern English would be fifty, eighty, a hundred years before Shakespeare), puts them off. They don't know where to begin. So they use SparkNotes, or something called No Fear Shakespeare. If you want to know how bad our schools are, just look up "No Fear Shakespeare" online, because kids use this by the millions — instructed to do so by their teachers.

The teachers themselves have a hard time reading Shakespeare, because they don't know the language, and they themselves were not instructed in this great heritage of literature. So they have to fall back on something — lesson plans provided for them online, and those lesson plans are almost always political. The kids are taught to look down their nose at Shakespeare: "We're smarter than Shakespeare. Shakespeare is a pain, basically — he's irritating because he uses this stupid language when he could actually say things simply, and he was a bigot, he was a sexist, he was this, that, and the other thing. But he's supposedly great, so we have to read him." He's completely disconnected from anything they might be taught about where he lived, when he lived, the Christian faith he espoused, what literature of the time was like, what the English language had been. They don't know any of that, so it comes to them like a torpedo out of nowhere. It's perversely designed to get kids to hate reading. Do that with Dickens too, and you've just destroyed the kid.

Question here. You indicated great familiarity with English literature and poetry. Are you familiar with C.S. Lewis's poetry as well? The reason I ask is he has one called "The Last of the Wine," and I think it fits the topic of our conversation well today — a man coming upon the shore of barbarians and wondering whether he's going to be eaten or worshiped. Slander to barbarians — barbarians had feasts, they just spoke a language that was "blah blah blah blah blah," that's why the Greeks called them barbaroi, they went "blah blah blah." But they had feasts.

No, I'm not familiar with that particular poem. I love the works of C.S. Lewis — his poetry is a little too deliberately old-fashioned, perhaps, but not to be dismissed either. I think Chesterton was the better poet. They were roughly contemporaneous — Chesterton died around 1936, Lewis died on the same day JFK died. You all know that? And Aldous Huxley, the author of Brave New World — all three men died on the same day.

I'll ask a quick question myself — forty-eight years of pastoral experience now — one of the comments you made somewhere this afternoon stuck in my mind: that no matter how great the catechesis or the preaching in our churches, if there's no — for lack of a better word — infrastructure, if the child really has no imagination cultivated, it's going to fall on deaf ears.

Yeah, it becomes — the faith then becomes notional. It's got to be embodied in our souls and made active.

Along those lines, could you summarize the gist of your fairly recent work, "How to Destroy Your Child's Imagination" — ten ways to destroy the imagination of your child?

You know, here's where poetry is a marvelous thing — I mentioned this last night. It's a great thing to do what my students at Magdalen College are doing right now — they're in the middle of, well, we're doing Nietzsche and others, but that's as a reprieve while they're reading The Brothers Karamazov. It's a big, long Russian novel — Russian novels are a thousand pages, eighteen hundred pages, like War and Peace. What else will you do in Russia, in the winter, but read a Russian novel? It may be very difficult to get somebody to read something eight hundred pages long. But a great poem can enter your mind and soul for the rest of your life, and you read it in two minutes.

I'll give you an example. This is part of a poem called "Christmas" by George Herbert. If you are not deeply familiar with the poetry of George Herbert, that's a shame — you ought to be. I think he is the greatest lyric poet in English. Notice I didn't say religious lyric poet — I say he is the greatest lyric poet in English. He wrote a poem called "Christmas." It's composed of a sonnet and a song. The sonnet is this — and this can be committed to memory, it's a powerful and moving little poem, and again it's called "Christmas":

"All after pleasures as I rode one day, my horse and I, both tired, body and mind, with full cry of affections quite astray, I took up in the next inn I could find. There when I came, whom found I but my dear, my dearest Lord, expecting till the grief of pleasures brought me to him, ready there to be all passengers' most sweet relief. O thou, whose glorious yet contracted light, wrapped in night's mantle, stole into a manger, since my dark soul and brutish is thy right, to man of all beasts be not thou a stranger. Furnish and deck my soul, that thou mayst have a better lodging than a rack or grave."

Amazing — for Christian theology, and passion for the incarnation of Christ as a little child, and his death and burial, and a more frank confession of our folly, our sin, would be hard to find. And yet the language is relatively simple and straightforward. That was just fourteen lines — amazing. A great lot can be delivered in very short space. It's dynamite.

Another question. You've spoken a few times today about our education system and perhaps its long-term effects. Obviously we're seeing the effects on a product of the public system — I'm a product of this, and I have a scar above my frontal lobe still. (You weren't supposed to see that — okay, yeah, cold cream, that's why.) Having the opportunity to hear you speak, and other things along the way, has led me to understand that we as Lutherans have a wonderful system of schools involved with our church. The mission of our church is to raise our children to be not only good Christians but also to enter into lines of work, church work, and that sort of thing. I'd love to hear your take — we have a wonderful system set up, and we abandoned, many years ago, a wonderful system that used to supply us with pastors and thinkers, and we've gone into a very practical, and perhaps secular, mindset for our schools and universities. Do you think it's even possible to go back to a classical model of education for our schools?

It is not impossible. I know some Catholics have done this with parochial schools here and there, hither and yon. A couple of things are necessary. You've got to get a headmaster who knows what's going on. Then you will have to replace retiring teachers with teachers who have had what is now called a classical education in arts and letters. "Classical" there means almost nothing other than an education in arts and letters that was taken for granted by people, let's say, in 1920 or 1925, before John Dewey got his hands on the public education system in the United States. By the way, if you look at the history of American textbooks — another of our hobbies is to collect old textbooks — they really do go off the edge of a cliff around 1930. It's that early. The book Why Johnny Can't Read was written in the late 1950s because of educational reforms that began to be put in place in the 1930s, and we still haven't learned from those failures.

Anyway, you need to replace them with teachers who have an education in arts and letters that would have been considered at least halfway respectable by somebody in 1910. And I think it means that everybody needs to be made aware that everything learned in the classroom bears upon the faith, and the faith bears upon everything. This doesn't mean that we are necessarily teaching biology as fundamentalists — I don't know, I myself have my grave doubts about Darwin — but it does mean that we see truth as one. It is not enough that they're learning the good Christian things in the religion class if they're reading garbage in English class. They ought to be reading good, solid human works in English too. Everybody's basically got to be part of the same enterprise.

I've said to Catholics, and I said to Lutherans last night: sometimes it's possible to reform these places, because otherwise they would die. And sometimes you will find a person willing to try something old and venerable because the alternative is death. Desperation might move some of these people. Now, some of them — I'm thinking especially of the old teaching orders of nuns in my communion, Roman Catholic — some of them would rather die, and have others die, than go back on their own apostasies. But other people might say, "Heck, this is stupid, we're going to lose our school, so we'll give it a try."

What I would suggest — and I have suggested this to others — is you put the word "classical" in the name of your school. Nobody knows what it means, but you can use it as a marker that we are teaching in a way that would be understood and approved by somebody living in 1920 — that is, we're giving them a standard education in arts and letters. And then you begin to take steps to make it a reality. Poetry comes back at all levels. Memorization comes back at all levels. Beauty comes back everywhere. It is not considered noble and grand to introduce teenagers to the obscene. Teenagers need to thrive on what is noble and grand and beautiful. They are made — teenagers are the natural idealists of the world. To give them ugly and grubby things is a despicable thing to do to teenage kids. Life will hit them, and they'll know plenty in time of the grubby and nasty and obscene. Does that help?

One more question. I'm a recovering Catholic — my name is Carl. (You should say hi, Carl. I'm a Roman Catholic, and I'm recovering.) There you go. One of the things I wanted to ask about was already touched on, I guess, with regard to your own personal teaching — where does memory work fit in? Scripture talks about "thy word have I hidden in my heart, that I might not sin against thee," and I think our liturgy lends itself to learning more about Scripture through song.

Yeah, exactly. Poetry would do the same thing. I just used Joyce Kilmer's — the "Delicatessen"? No — "The Rouge Bouquet." He was a war hero, by the way. He died in the First World War, right after writing it, brave man. "But the scene shall never fit the deed. Grotesquely, wonders come to pass. The fool will mount an Arab steed, while Jesus rides upon an ass." The end of the poem is easy to memorize, and it helps them remember the sermon.

It also, I'd guess, is something you'd use in your classes on poetry — where does it fit, do you think, in reclaiming a generation?

Oh, absolutely — memorization, yes, absolutely necessary. I want to knock the teeth down the throat of teachers who pride themselves on not doing rote memorization. They don't know the first thing about what it's really like to love a piece of literature or a song and have the words really appropriated by heart.

Let me give you an example — should I give an example of this? You want one? I'll give you an example, if you'll be patient, of a theology lesson in self-deception and evil that a year's worth of theology would hardly be able to touch. But if you see it and hear it, or if you commit it to heart, it is always with you. The scene is the earth, and Satan has just arrived, and he is not around the other devils, so he can afford to speak his mind — he doesn't have to play the politician, as I mentioned before, he can almost be honest. And he looks up at the sun in the sky, and he says these words — bear with me, this is Milton now, this is language that is three hundred sixty years old, and you tell me if it's completely incomprehensible:

"O thou that with surpassing glory crowned, look'st from thy sole dominion like the god of this new world; at whose sight all the stars hide their diminished heads; to thee I call, but with no friendly voice, and add thy name, O sun, to tell thee how I hate thy beams, that bring to my remembrance from what state I fell, how glorious once above thy sphere, till pride and worse ambition threw me down, warring in heaven against heaven's matchless king. Ah, wherefore? He deserved no such return from me, whom he created what I was in that bright eminence, and with his good upbraided none, nor was his service hard. What could be less than to afford him praise, the easiest recompense, and give him thanks? How due! Yet all his good proved ill in me, and wrought but malice. Lifted up so high, I disdained subjection, and thought one step higher would set me highest, and in a moment quit the debt immense of endless gratitude, so burdensome, still paying, still to owe, forgetful what from him I still received, and understood not that a grateful mind, by owing, owes not, but still pays, at once indebted and discharged. What burden then? O had his powerful destiny ordained me some inferior angel, I had stood then happy, no unbounded hope had raised ambition. Yet why not? Some other power as great might have aspired, and me, though mean, drawn to his part. But other powers as great fell not, but stand unshaken, from within or from without to all temptations armed. Hadst thou the same free will and power to stand? Thou hadst. Whom hast thou then, or what, to accuse, but heaven's free love dealt equally to all? Be then his love accursed, since love or hate, to me alike, it deals eternal woe. Nay, cursed be thou, since against his thy will chose freely what it now so justly rues. Me miserable! Which way shall I fly infinite wrath, and infinite despair? Which way I fly is hell; myself am hell; and in the lowest deep a lower deep still threatening to devour me opens wide, to which the hell I suffer seems a heaven. O then at last relent: is there no place left for repentance, none for pardon left? None left but by submission; and that word disdain forbids me, and my dread of shame among the spirits beneath, whom I seduced with other promises and other vaunts than to submit, boasting I could subdue the omnipotent. Ay me, they little know how dearly I abide that boast so vain, under what torments inwardly I groan, while they adore me on the throne of hell, with diadem and sceptre high advanced, the lower still I fall, only supreme in misery: such joy ambition finds. But say I could repent, and could obtain by act of grace my former state; how soon would height recall high thoughts, how soon unsay what feigned submission swore? Ease would recant vows made in pain, as violent and void, for never can true reconcilement grow where wounds of deadly hate have pierced so deep, which would but lead me to a worse relapse and heavier fall; so should I purchase dear short intermission, bought with double smart. This knows my punisher; therefore as far from granting he as I from begging peace. All hope excluded thus, behold, instead of us, outcast, exiled, his new delight, mankind created, and for him this world. So farewell hope, and with hope farewell fear, farewell remorse; all good to me is lost. Evil, be thou my good; by thee at least divided empire with heaven's king I hold, by thee, and more than half perhaps will reign; as man ere long, and this new world, shall know."

Was that incomprehensible? A tricky word here and there — the illogic, the self-deception, the politicking, the emptiness of ambition — a semester's worth of theology lessons are packed into about ninety lines. You get them by heart, and they become part of you. This is a great resource just untapped. I might say ably performed, to use a technical word — embodied — before us. I hate to be — I mean, especially doing this in front of students, they're all cute young people and they're looking at me and smiling. I used to do it blindfolded, because I couldn't say it unless I couldn't actually see them. But I figured you're older, you aren't as innocent.

So — Satan's envy of humanity, because God's grace has come upon them, things into which angels long to look. Again, we are so indebted to you. I speak for all of us in thanking you for your teaching, for your inspiration. Shall we? Thank you.