Noe’s Classical Ark

Wicked foolishness continues apace on the higher academic earth. The flood is sweeping away institution after institution. Yet at least one righteous man is gathering together verbal creatures of every kind—masculine, feminine, and neuter— into an ark and waiting for the flood waters to recede.

First, the wicked foolishness. Almost a year ago, my fellow alumnus Nate Fischer penned “A Warning to Calvin University” at The American Mind, warning the school to stop imitating the herd of independent minds running other institutions. Instead, they should hew more closely to the vigorous liberal arts tradition and distinctive Reformed (Calvinist) view of the world that put the small college on the map in the first place. That would mean, he explained, “emphasizing, rather than downplaying, issues where Calvin diverges from mainstream norms.”

Alas, that is not what has happened in so many ways, especially when it comes to all the usual issues of our day on race, sexuality, and “gender.” Though it is not exactly a woke institution, the signs of slouching in Harvard’s general direction are there. “Calvin’s trend toward greater alignment with mainstream academia,” Mr. Fischer, a successful investor and businessman, wrote, “will not save it but rather set it up for failure as it faces increasingly brutal competition with numerous virtually undifferentiated schools. Put succinctly, Calvin’s imitation of other schools will be its downfall.”[i]Despite Calvin’s “promotion” from college to university and its securing of a $22 million dollar gift to begin a business school, Mr. Fischer believed that investors in the school might be the victims of Gresham’s Law—“throwing good money after bad.” If a university is being swept away in the all-destroying flood, endowing it will do little.

While it is perhaps too early to say whether Fischerian pessimism is fully vindicated, the early signs are striking. Not only on issues where the Reformed Christian tradition (like the Orthodox and Catholic traditions) contradicts the world, but right in the heart of that liberal arts tradition that I so loved as a student. Less than a year after the warning, Calvin announced that it is ending majors in classics, German, Dutch, Chinese, and astronomy. This is quite astonishing all around. While astronomy might be studied as part of a physics major, Dutch is a tie to the school’s origins; it is the language of the Calvinist immigrants who founded it. German remains a language that is essential for scholarly work in most humanities fields. For a school that prides itself on its international outlook and especially with regard to business, Chinese would seem to be a no-brainer and yet gets the axe. So much for practical decisions. Most outrageous, however, is the elimination of the classics.

This move epitomizes Calvin’s feckless imitation of everybody else. Greek and Latin are languages essential for students who want to study theology, many branches of history, and philosophy—the last subject being the field that has made Calvin most famous for its legendary alumni and professors, including Alvin Plantinga, Nicholas Wolterstorff, Richard Mouw, John Hare, and Peter Kreeft. Professor Wolterstorff himself once wrote that one of the essential elements of the department’s outlook from its beginnings was that:

we were invited to regard the entire tradition of Christian thought as our heritage. Protestants sometimes assume that true Christian thought began with the Reformation, or several centuries later with the Wesleys. We were taught that the Church Fathers were part of our heritage, that the medieval philosophers Anselm and Aquinas were part of our heritage, and so forth, the whole lot of them.[ii]

To really know a heritage and keep it is to keep alive the knowledge of its languages. Yet the Church Fathers and the medieval thinkers—not to mention many of the Protestant Reformers themselves— mostly wrote in Greek or Latin. If Calvin, desperate like all institutions to do so, had wanted to distinguish itself and score diversity points, it shouldn’t have axed Greek and Latin. It should have added Syriac and Coptic.

One can be grateful that Calvin’s dumping of classics is wholesale. Princeton recently announced that you can get a classics degree without studying any Greek or Latin. I hesitate to suggest a Princeton musical performance degree focusing on air guitar since such jokes too quickly become reality. Enough, however, of the 40-days-and-nights weather reporting. Let us return to the righteous man.

David Noe (pronounced “No-ee”), with whom I studied in the early nineties at Calvin, is the chairman of the classics department soon to disappear below the waters. When I read of Calvin’s decision, I contacted Professor Noe to confirm if the story I read were true. It was. Though he declined to bash the institution we both love, he did lament the direction it has taken. But he is firmly fixed on what he’s going to do next. The classical ark he has built is composed of an innovative on-line Latin instruction program, Latin Per Diem, and a corresponding Greek program, which adapts to new use Charles Melville Moss’s 1893—and freely available in the public domain—A First Greek Reader.

Professor Noe began building the ark nearly six years ago. It started when a friend told him about a Baptist seminary student who was offering an online daily dose of Greek. “You do this with Latin,” the friend advised. So he did. He started offering a four-to-six minute lesson posted on YouTube one Friday and hasn’t looked back. A rough estimate is that he has posted about 1,750 lessons in that time. After a while he started posting Greek lessons, too. And now he has a podcast with the delightful classically-spelled title, “Ad Navseam.”[iii]

An accomplished translator, especially of Reformation-era works, the professor uses for his lessons only primary texts. Some are quite obscure, he tells me, but many of them involve figures you may have heard of such as Cicero, Augustine, Thomas Aquinas, and Erasmus. As his audience began to grow, he began to get requests, many of them from older people who had returned to the classics and now wanted somebody to talk to about them. “Can you read some Homer with me?” “Would you teach me Cicero?”

He set his rates and started to offer discussion sessions for texts he’d chosen, limited to ten people at most. The result was better than he had expected. “There are no constraints on what I can or can’t do and no limits on what I can or can’t say.”Best of all, teaching on his own involved no faculty meetings. The day we spoke on the phone, he told me he was preparing for a new discussion group to begin that day on Erasmus’s Enchiridion militis christianior, in English, Handbook of a Christian Knight.

When I ask how he feels about teaching online versus in person, he tells me, “Obviously I prefer teaching in person.” In fact, he had announced an in-person week-long colloquium last summer to be held at his house in Grand Rapids, Michigan. You know what happened in 2020, however. He is planning to try again in the near future, but he is enjoying what he has right now:  “I don’t really have any regrets about the online format; it certainly has lots of limitations and drawbacks. But it also wonderfully connects people.”

He tells me about the make-up of the Erasmus study group, which includes: a Catholic homeschool mom from Idaho and a Protestant one from Florida; a Catholic priest from Washington, DC, and an Evangelical minister from New Zealand; a Lutheran professor at Stanford and a Catholic grad student from Baton Rouge; classical Christian school teachers from Portland and Wichita; and an Italian philosophy PhD in Michigan and a seventy-something retiree from Melbourne, Australia. Two by two, indeed. Professor Noe wryly notes that “it would be difficult to convene such a group in person.” His aim, he says, is to “take everyone in the classroom and carry them along to the goal.”

His ark already floats, but he’s looking to make it bigger and keep more people from going under the waves of Lethe, the waters of forgetfulness. In September he will be offering more courses, lectures, and even travel tours to make sure, as he puts it, “this beautiful repository of literature, poetry, philosophy, and art—with all its flaws, warts, and limitations—is preserved and handed off to the next generation.”

As universities jettison programs like classics, people will need to look elsewhere for these treasures. Hopefully, more creative projects like Professor Noe’s will be launched. Anchors aweigh![iv]

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Notes:

[i]“A Warning to Calvin University,”The American Mind, July 6, 2020.

[ii]Nicholas Wolterstorff, “The Renaissance of Christian Philosophy,”Christian Scholars Blog, April 18, 2021.

[iii]See his site: www.LatinPerDiem.comfor more information. For his podcast with Jeff Winkle, see here.

[iv]You can donate to help Professor Noe with some start-up costshere. Or go subscribe at his Patreon page.

The featured image is one of the “Bible Pictures with brief descriptions by Charles Foster, published in 1897, Philadelphia, PA.” This file is in the public domain, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.