The most exciting piece of punctuation is the period. It marks strong assertions of fact or opinion and gives the reader a pause to digest them and decide whether to affirm, deny, or leave them hanging till later evidence comes in, from the following sentences or other sources. We could use a lot more [...]
Language is at the heart of Creation. Because we are created in the image of God who spoke and created intelligible matter, our language mirrors Creation in a hazy, incomplete way. Our speech calls into existence names and creates a narrative to link together our experiences in a coherent way. A life without words [...]
In order to reap the full rewards of a classical education, schools should prize the classical languages as highly as they do the mathematical arts. The qualitative and the quantitative are essential aspects of human understanding, without which no one may be fully educated. Every rule has a story. Perhaps you have read an [...]
Frequently in public forums, people forget Augustine’s simple truth: Words fail or succeed based on what truth or reality they represent to their audience. Augustine would ask us to further the “mutual intercourse of men” and remember that words serve us by their remembrance, their representation, and their reality. As a literature teacher, I [...]
For all those out there wondering, including my first-grade art teacher who never learned how to pronounce it, my surname is actually pronounced with a long rather than short “e.” It’s “DEE-vuhl” and not “Devil.” But the moniker of a demon has been applied to me so often that I have decided to make [...]
Apologists for Greek and Latin have lately dwindled. Yet in the past several years there have been some notable attempts to save classical education from utter extinction—one of which is Tracy Lee Simmons’ “Climbing Parnassus.” Climbing Parnassus: A New Apologia for Greek and Latin, by Tracy Lee Simmons (290 pages, Intercollegiate Studies Institute, 2007) [...]
Learning and language are intimately related. People speak well—clearly, concretely, and accurately—about the things they know, and poorly when they pontificate about things they don’t. Broadly-educated people speak well about many things; they are dilettantes rather than pedants, the two kinds of intellectual according to Miguel de Unamuno. Primo Levi, a professional chemist as [...]
Latin, as the primary historical language of erudition and learning in the West, is the sole gateway into the halls of Western thought and humanistic learning. Without the use of this language, we can hardly know ourselves, and certainly not the road that brought us to the modern day. “To read Latin and Greek [...]
To cast off our name is to cast off who we are. By embracing a name, crying out to it, we somehow do the opposite. We embed it into ourselves. With every repetition of the Sacred Name, we change the entire cosmos, and we change ourselves. “As the most effective prayer the Church Fathers use [...]
Robert Frost’s theory goes to the heart of his entire aesthetic philosophy and conception of art, and is ultimately a vital part of his great skill and power both as a conversationalist and poet, and in his metaphorical habits of thought as a philosophical dualist: “I was poetry that talked.” From around 1913 until [...]
Words are only one level at which we can understand the world. Franz Liszt used sounds, melodies, and changes to convey the religious experience of Alphonse de Lamartine’s poem “Apparitions.” That is the joy of listening to classical music: It is an exercise in understanding the mind of a genius on a deeper level, [...]
I did not become an English professor because of my early public education—but despite it. The standards advocated in the public schools pose a danger to our English-speaking world, and losing our language, or our ability to remake it, is indistinguishable from the diminishment of our Western civilization. Like most American children who attended [...]
Archaisms renew the language; they are the means by which language is renovated and restored to its original splendor. It is the old things that make all things new. The “coming peril” was not Bolshevism, G.K. Chesterton said in 1927, only ten years after the Bolshevik Revolution, it was “standardization by a low standard.” For [...]
Learning another language helps me to not only understand, but to better experience first-hand how another person thinks, feels, and interacts with the world; this creates the possibility for empathy, fellow-feeling, and ultimately, charity. Having taught high-school Spanish for the first time last fall, I have been wondering why it is that we teach [...]