Since we’re gearing up for the homeschool conference season, and because the number of people (teachers and parents) migrating to Classical Christian Education (CCE) is astounding—and joyfully so!—I thought this post was worth reviving from the archives and giving it a slight update.

Talking with a colleague a while back, he pointed out how the families attending homeschooling conferences over the past few summers are drastically different than the families who attended the same conferences pre-COVID. For example, fewer large families with a train of kids in tow, daughters in long dresses and sons in denim, boots, and button-ups.

What he was observing was a new wave of families who have fled or are fleeing public schools; many who are discovering in classical Christian education (CCE) a scratch for the itch they couldn’t put words to, previously. Many teachers are discovering the same.

My conservative guess is that I have interviewed nearly 400 teachers since we launched Kepler Education in 2020. A number of these teachers have an understanding of CCE, but an equal number of those interested are looking for a way to jump out of the cesspool that is public education into the refreshing pool that is CCE.

One of the questions I am most frequently asked by these educators is, “What books should I read to learn more about Classical Christian Education?”

Like many of us who now know our way around the CCE world a little better today than we did a few years ago, these new families and educators are just as hungry as we were to read the books that will guide them into this new old way of educating.

In my own journey, I have collected more than a couple hundred books on education in general, CCE, homeschooling, the history of education, and cultural issues related to education. In the spirit of sharing something of my own journey, I want to offer a short series on the books I believe every family or teacher should read to become well-versed in CCE.

In this post, I’ll start with my top ten picks for new families and teachers who want/need an introduction to the landscape and the philosophy of CCE.

1. Why Christian Kids Need a Christian Education by Douglas Wilson. This is a small book, a worldview primer really, explaining why Christian faith is essential to education and secular education will never do—especially for Christian families.

2. Recovering the Lost Tools of Learning by Douglas Wilson. Love him or hate him, Douglas Wilson is one of the premier voices in the renewal of Classical Christian Education and the school he helped found, Logos School in Moscow, ID, is one of the flagship Classical Christian Schools. In some sense, this is the book that launched the modern revival of CCE. It too is a must-read.

3. The Case for Classical Christian Education by Douglas Wilson is a companion to the first book in this list. In some sense it is an expansion of the primer I shared in the first entry in this series, but it’s worth adding to your reading list.

4. Classical Education: The Movement Sweeping America by Gene Edward Veith Jr. and Andrew Kern is like having a topographical map complete with a compass. This little work is a “who’s who” and a “what’s what” for helping families and teachers navigate the full landscape of CCE.

5. The Liberal Arts Tradition: A Philosophy of Christian Classical Education by Ravi Jain and Kevin Clark is one my all-time favorites for providing a simple, cogent philosophy of Christian Classical Education. Be sure to get the 3^rd edition. It is much more comprehensive, with practical helps included. This is also one of the first times I started seeing educators making a distinction between Christian Classical Education and Classical Christian Education. The main difference in the expression—as I understand it—is an attempt to distinguish between classical education that is informed by a Christian worldview and an expression of liberal arts education specifically tied to the classical Christian period in history. tomato, tomâto!

6. Wisdom and Eloquence: A Christian Paradigm for Classical Learning by Robert Littlejohn and Charles T. Evans is up next. This book’s subtitle reveals its nuanced approach to CCE. Drawing from St. Augustine’s assertion that Christians should be every bit as, if not more, wise and eloquent than the pagans since we own the truth, this book advocates for the kind of wisdom and virtue we should be striving to instill in our children. All truth is God’s truth and a proper education is what prepares our children for this subversive world.

7. Mortimer Adler: The Paideia Way of Classical Education by Robert M. Woods, PhD and published by Classical Academic Press in their Giants in the History of Education series. Mortimer J. Adler was a modern pioneer in the recovery of the Great Books and liberal arts traditions, and one of the most influential leaders in education reform in the twentieth century. I will mention some of his more important books later in my series, but this little book, written by one of my mentors in CCE, is a helpful introduction to his life, writings, and teaching philosophy.

8. The Well-Trained Mind by Jessie Wise and Susan Wise Bauer. This is one of the classic texts on the subject and provides a comprehensive picture of what CCE is and how families can provide their children with such an education. This is a must-read.

9. Simply Classical by Cheryl Swope. This is a unique and extremely important book in the conversation on CCE because the author demonstrates (from her personal experience) how CCE is not just for “smart kids,” but is an education even for children with disabilities. By virtue of its liberating power, CCE is for everyone, regardless of their special needs or situation.

10. The Art of Humane Education by Donald Philip Verene. Not everyone will agree with me for placing this book this close to the top of the reading list. I chose this book because it is a short but elegant read. It is certain to have a rich impact on one’s thinking about the philosophy of education early in their journey.

Stay tuned in. I still have another 40 or so titles to share with you. And, I have yet to mention a few of the most renowned or respected books on CCE yet. I chose the ones I did because they are thorough and accessible; and, someone unfamiliar with the territory will be able to navigate the CCE landscape fairly successfully by reading just these five books.

To think Christianly about education is to think incarnationally about humanity and the cosmos (i.e., the world). C. S. Lewis makes a profound observation to this end, particularly in terms of our responsibility toward others, in his remarkable essay, “The Weight of Glory.” Lewis writes,

The load, or weight, or burden of my neighbour’s glory should be laid on my back, a load so heavy that only humility can carry it, and the backs of the proud will be broken. It is a serious thing to live in a society of possible gods and goddesses, to remember that the dullest and most uninteresting person you can talk to may one day be a creature which, if you saw it now, you would be strongly tempted to worship, or else a horror and a corruption such as you now meet, if at all, only in a nightmare. All day long we are, in some degree, helping each other to one or other of these destinations. It is in the light of these overwhelming possibilities, it is with the awe and the circumspection proper to them, that we should conduct all our dealings with one another, all friendships, all loves, all play, all politics. There are no ordinary people. You have never talked to a mere mortal.1

I can’t think of a more appropriate context for thinking about one’s neighbor than the place of education. Our children and our students, often one and the same, are some of our closest neighbors. All day, every day, parents and teachers are to some degree or another, helping students toward one or other of these eternal destinations—toward glory or toward horror.

Lewis’s observation that our neighbors (i.e., students) are no mere mortals, that they deserve our help, and that their glory is worthy of our burden, derives from his incarnational humanism.

In short, incarnational humanism is the Christian understanding and acknowledgement that the Incarnation “has thus greatly exalted and ennobled humanity.”2 Thus, there are no ordinary people. Further, “Incarnational Humanism asserts that orthodox Christology provides the most promising source for a common vision of a truly humane society.”3 This is because the Incarnation has unmade dualism and rejects the reductionism that exists in the modern understandings of the human condition (i.e., anthropology).

First Implication of Incarnational Education

Consider the following implications of the Incarnation and how thinking incarnationally about reality is thinking Christianly about education. First, by grounding all human knowledge in the logos of Christ, reason and faith are unified, not divorced or bifurcated. Both come from the same source—God—and each depends on and cannot supersede the other.

Second Implication of Incarnational Education

Second, because “God had become human and had truly taken creation and humanity into the divine life,”4 to think Christianly is to possess a sacramental metaphysics. That’s lofty theological language to explain the view of the universe that recognizes supernatural life participates with natural life. God mediates grace through material means. Said more succinctly, to think incarnationally (i.e., to think Christianly) is to understand that heaven and earth really are connected and really are involved with one another.

Third Implication of Incarnational Education

A third implication of viewing reality through the Incarnation is recognizing that the disciplines through which modern education tends to treat ideas (i.e., psychology, anthropology, theology, etc.) are, in actuality, inseparable. Of course, it is sometimes helpful to make some artificial separations for the purpose of studying a thing, or to see it in new or varied relationships. But modern educators have taken these artificial separations as realities in and of themselves, and that has had enormously harmful consequences on education and human flourishing. The late USC English professor, David Eggenschwiler, reminded his readers, “If one believes that existence is basically unified, one cannot adequately approach it from any one separate discipline.”5 He went on to explain:

Early Christian thought had this universal view. Augustine draws no methodological division between philosophy and theology or, in philosophy, between metaphysics and psychology, within theology, between theoretical dogma and practical application to life but his mind proceeds from the whole of Christian existence to consider the total pattern and its different parts.6

In other words, all levels of meaning are present in one reality—theological, psychological, and social, etc.; and, when we do discuss levels of meaning in reality, we are actually not discussing real levels at all. We only do so for the convenience of making critical descriptions. To think Christianly is to see all levels of meaning as integrated in the same reality.

Fourth Implication of Incarnational Education

A fourth implication of incarnational thinking is embodiment. Embodiment is essential to thinking Christianly because the Incarnation is the great mystery to our existence: the real embodiment of the Divine in the human, the convergence of pure spirit and humanity, which itself is both spirit and matter.

In order to be fully human, then, spirit and body cannot be separated; we are neither a spirit simply carrying around a body, nor are we a body merely animated by a spirit. We are fully and wholly both together. Thus, our own bodily resurrection—not our disembodied ethereal existence in heaven—is the blessed hope of the believer.

Fifth Implication of Incarnational Education

A final implication of incarnational humanism (at least for our purposes) is a little more complex, but essential for thinking Christianly in and about education and human flourishing. Consider that the world, although it is created, finite, and distinct from God, can only be separated from God completely by ceasing to be since God is the source of all being.

What does this mean for education in laymen’s terms? It means that since God is the creator, he is the source of man’s being also, his vitality. Because this is so, man’s true freedom can only be obtained by accepting and submitting to the will of God (this will seem like bondage, however, if man is in rebellion). It also means that even if man attempts to deny or defy God, he cannot ultimately destroy the infinite within himself.

Nevertheless, if man estranges himself from God—say, in an attempt to be his own autonomous self—his soul will become deformed since God is the true source of his vitality and he is cutting himself off from it. Given the inseparable nature of reality, this will prove equally true about his relationship with his essential self. To run from God and distort one’s soul by depriving it of its vitality, and subsequently becoming at odds with one’s essential self, will be to naturally displace oneself from community because anti-social behavior will be the manifestation of his spiritual and psychological estrangements.

Such a man will be tormented because he possesses in his imagination images of “a lost Eden which he still vaguely remembers because the image of God has not been entirely defaced.” We can see the archetype of this condition in Genesis 4, when Cain departs from the presence of God, unrepentant, and establishes a city with “likenesses” to the City of God, although it is grotesque and distorted (i.e., consider the moral order and lex talion expressed by the sixth generation of Cain, Lamech, in Genesis 4:19-24, and compare it with the moral order and lex talion given by God to Moses on Sinai in Exodus 20, repeated again in Deut. 5).

This final implication recalls what Lewis said in the excerpt quoted above:

remember that the dullest and most uninteresting person you can talk to may one day be a creature which, if you saw it now, you would be strongly tempted to worship, or else a horror and a corruption such as you now meet, if at all, only in a nightmare…There are no ordinary people. You have never talked to a mere mortal.7

In sum, to think Christianly is to think incarnationally.

Because God became man in the person of Jesus Christ, he ennobled humanity; because of this, orthodox Christology provides the most promising source for a common vision of a truly humane society, faith and reason are united, heaven and earth’s connections are realized, the whole and integrated pattern of our existence is envisioned, and we are able to see how our own lives flourish or falter in direct relationship to our obedience to the will of God, our light and the source of our vitality.

“The words of the Preacher, the son of David, king in Jerusalem. Vanity of vanities, says the Preacher, vanity of vanities! All is vanity. What does man gain by all the toil at which he toils under the sun?” -Ecclesiastes 1:1–3

Many years ago when my youngest daughter was in elementary school, she asked a profound question that caught me off guard! It was striking to me that an eight-year-old was wrangling with a perennial question philosophers and theologians have wrangled with for a millennia.

“Dad, is life just days and days and days until we die?” She asked.

In her childlike rationale, she was trying to figure out what life was all about. While she couldn’t articulate it so precisely at the time, she wanted to know what the end game was to this repetitious rising and setting of the sun we call today, tomorrow, and yesterday? She was wondering, how long is this repetitious process going to last? And, how do I know if I’m missing something?

The question rightly demanded an answer, but the truth is, I couldn’t think of one that addressed the complexity of the question in terms she could comprehend. So, I basically ducked the question and just answered, “Pretty much, I guess.”

The significance of this anecdote is reflected in the first chapter of Ecclesiastes.

Qoheleth is asking the question,

“What do I get for all the work that I work at on this earth?

What’s the purpose of my life and labor?

What use is everything I’ve accomplished if, in the end, I die anyway? What’s the use?”

The despair is that much more compelling when we understand the author’s back story.

This is a man who has tried everything, done everything, and lived life to its absolute fullest. He is a man who never denied his appetites a single pleasure. By all practical purposes, he should have been the happiest man alive; yet when he approaches his end, he can only confess that he hated life.

We’ll explore all the reasons in coming Crumbs, but he summarizes them in Ecclesiastes 2:17 when he says,

“So I hated life, because what is done under the sun was grievous to me, for all is vanity and a striving after wind.”

The Author

As was previously mentioned, the author of the book of Ecclesiastes is Solomon, the son of the famed king, David (1:1), the king over Israel in Jerusalem (1:12). While the text never names Solomon as the author, all proverbial fingers point to him. He was the son of David. And besides David, only Solomon ruled Israel from Jerusalem. After Solomon died, his son, Rehoboam caused a civil war that divided the kingdom, so Israel and Judah each had their own king. Further, many of the pursuits and achievements of the author of Ecclesiastes corresponds specifically with the accounts of Solomon given in 1 Kings.

The Book

The book of Ecclesiastes is a 12-chapter sermon written in the 10th century BC (about 3,000 years ago) that explores every facet of “life under the sun.”

This expression “under the sun” is used 29 times—if we include the three times he uses the synonymous expression, “under heaven.” The meaning of this expression was an idea that was key to understanding the meaning of life in the ancient world.

In some ways, it’s similar to Plato’s realm of the forms—the idea that there is a life below the line (things we can see and interact with), and above the line (the realm of the Forms: the reality of truth, goodness, and beauty itself).

The expression, as used by Solomon, speaks of life on earth without God, and with death being our final end. His sermon looks at life through the worldview of a materialist. It’s not that Solomon was an atheist; he just lived like one, practically, and realized too late the true meaning of life.

Like Benjamin Franklin aptly noted, Life’s tragedy is that we get old too soon and wise too late.

Solomon’s conclusion was: it’s all vanity. It’s all worthless and empty. The expression Vanity, or vanity of vanities is used 34 times, and is translated from the Hebrew word, hevel, meaning emptiness, futility, breath, or vapor. It’s the same concept James uses when he says in James 4:14 …What is your life? For you are a mist that appears for a little time and then vanishes.

The expression “vanity of vanities” is a superlative. It means the most worthlessness of worthlessnesses.

It compares with what the Jewish writer Sholom Aleichem once described life as “a blister on top of a tumor, and a boil on top of that.” You can almost feel that definition!

If we have any inclination toward wisdom, then we cannot afford not to pay close attention to this sermon. It’s a sermon that Jesus sums up with one statement:

“For what does it profit a man to gain the whole world and forfeit his soul?” (Mark 8:36, ESV)

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Most trips begin with a destination in mind, unless you’re taking one of the road trips my military buddies and I used to take on a weekend pass. We would just hop in a car of someone willing to drive and head out on the highway looking for adventure—or whatever might come our way. Happy to see where the wind would blow us for the next forty-eight hours, we didn’t have a plan or a particular direction; our only agenda was fun and adventure.

When I took road trips with my family growing up, it was a lot different. My dad had a map, a budget, and for a while, a motorhome. We usually set out for a lake, some mountains, or sometimes grandma’s house. But we always had a destination and a deadline. My dad didn’t stop much when we traveled places. I got the sense stopping was taboo. I’m pretty sure that’s why we had the old wander wagon.

In the motorhome you had food and drinks and a bathroom, everything one needed to always make “good time.” I remember looking out the back window of the roaming rover gawking at all the other travelers wondering what it would be like to stay in a motel or stop at rest stops like they did. I would gaze at the scenery as it blurred by, watching for cool places I wanted to come back and explore and think that it must be a big thing to make good time.

Truthfully, my dad never said much about it, except when we were failing to make good time. Mostly, he would just look at his watch when we reached our destination, and report, “We made good time.”

There was this one time my dad stopped, though, near Bryce Canyon in Utah. I remember looking out the window trying to make the cars behind us levitate with my mind (It’s complicated and irrelevant to this story, but that’s what I was doing when I was nine or ten), when suddenly I heard a commotion behind me.

We had all been drinking Orange Crush and putting our cans in the cup holders that were mounted on top of what they called “the dog house.” I’m not sure why, but that’s the name they give the engine compartment cover between the front seats, a feature distinctive to motorhomes, buses, and some older vans. On the top of the dog house was a half-dozen-or-so cup-holder slots. My younger brother, who was about five or six at the time, was thirsty and started picking up the cans and shaking them to hear if any of them sloshed inside.

On the fourth or fifth can, he heard what he was looking for, threw his head back, mouth wide open, anticipating some refreshing orange soda. It was only about two swallows before he, and everyone else, realized he had located my dad’s spittoon.

A slimy, tar-colored mixture projected through to cab—along with the rest of his stomach contents! My dad stopped that time. It was the fastest I’d ever seen him pull over our transit tank. We also didn’t make very good time that trip, but the scenery at Bryce Canyon was great.

Somewhere in my formative years, I learned to approach much of life the way I remember my dad approaching road trips—with a destination and a deadline. Of course, making good time works well enough when you need to get from point A to point B in a hurry, but it’s a much less adequate way to live life and do ministry.

Academically, I knew all the clichéd maxims: the journey is the destination; happiness is a way of traveling, not a place to arrive; the process is our product and presence is the ultimate prize. My heart got it but my head harbored the constant objective of “just finishing.”

Unsurprisingly, the fundamentalist version of Christianity I inherited and adopted shared the same instinct. Heaven was the destination, the “Roman’s road” was the map, the “sinner’s prayer” was the ticket to get there, and everything else—the perennial human questions, the pursuit of beauty and goodness, meaningful conversations, even family fun and sharing in our children’s stories—were all delays to making good time. Sanctification was all about spiritual efficiency; and growth, not God, was the goal.

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“The telos of classical education is not to produce a graduate who will one day earn a six-figure salary or run for Congress. Our goal is much harder to obtain:” writes Mandi Gerth in her book, Thoroughness and Charm. Gerth’s claim is that classical educators “are aiming to produce students characterized by virtue” (11), but this cannot be accomplished if teachers don’t know how to manage their classrooms effectively—that is, with thoroughness and charm.

The central thrust of Gerth’s message, then, is to “dramatically change the classroom culture,” a task, she argues, that will “foster habits of thinking, doing, and being, which form our students and order their loves” (7).

Gerth touches a nerve that many educators in the classical Christian renewal seem to sense but, perhaps, struggle to do anything about. Those of us who did not receive a classical education when we were growing up are ecstatic about recovering these lost tools of learning, but are often stuck at thirty-thousand feet in the air. Of course, we read Great Books, attend conferences, and discuss the pedagogical theories of cultivating wisdom and virtue ad nauseum, but how to land the plane, put boots on the ground, and effect real change where it matters seems to be one of the biggest challenges at present. Gerth writes,

Sadly, there seems to be a real reluctance in classical circles to discuss the nuts and bolts of classroom management. We prefer to attend workshops on Socratic seminars or listen to lectures on Abolition of Man. But the cold, hard truth of teaching is that we are completely ineffective, no matter how passionate we are, if we can’t manage the classroom.(5)

Gerth’s book attempts to solve that dilemma and close the gap between theory and practice by offering some tried and true experiential techniques. As the publisher’s website suggests: Thoroughness and Charm “gives specific examples on how shared experiences—not activities—build culture, support the curriculum, and pass on the classical tradition while habituating the students to what is true and good for their souls.”

Notably, Thoroughness and Charm takes its title from St. Thomas Aquinas’s Oratio Ante Studium, a prayer he habitually invoked before his daily studies and writing. Translated for the book’s epigraph, Aquinas’s prayer reads:

The epigraphical prayer is worth mentioning because Gerth’s book is not merely a skills-based teacher training manual. It’s a spiritually thoughtful syllabus for cultivating teachers who can “embody noble ideas and biblical values” and also know how to manage “the transitions and procedures of the actual class day” (7).

Some readers may be surprised to discover Gerth advocates for real authority in the classroom where the teacher is not the students’ egalitarian friend or babysitter, but one who inspires respect and awe, like a monarch. Gerth asserts,

Our problem is not one of teachers abusing their authority; ours is a problem of teachers having no authority at all. I’m encouraging us to think hard about how the rise of snowplow parents who refuse to let their children struggle has put teachers and the classroom in the crosshairs, demanding the school should be a safe and happy place where every child does that which is right in his own eyes (15).

In Gerth’s estimation, the right kind of “meanness” is a virtue. Lest a reader recoil at this classical perspective of proper authority in the classroom, perhaps a cursory look at today’s public schools might provide some better perspective on where we are in comparison. In modern schools where therapeutics and electronic devices are the guiding principles, teachers are regularly assaulted and often feel accomplished if, as one public school teacher told me, “we can keep these kids from dealing drugs, assaulting each other, or having sex in the quad before the school day is over.”

But make no mistake; Gerth is not authoritarian about authority in the classroom. Teachers aren’t despots with carte blanche privilege. Classical teachers must embody the tradition they are attempting to transmit to their students. Their job in the classroom is to win respect and inspire love by setting limits, establishing boundaries, and implementing order conducive for student learning. And, just like the parents and the church to which the student belongs, the teacher cannot shirk his or her role or responsibilities. “Not one of the three gets to abdicate their role. Not one of the three gets to overstep” (25).

While this review has so far focused primarily on the important role of establishing proper authority for reclaiming classical learning, it’s obviously not the full story. It is, however, the foundation for the rest of the classical recovery enterprise. Gerth’s remaining chapters focus on the nuts and bolts of forming the students’ imaginations, raising the perennial human questions, building foundational culture, and creating liturgical classrooms.

In each of these chapters, Gerth brings the pedagogical conversation down from the aether of theoria to the soil of praxis, offering meaningful guidance and helpful illustrations for achieving the task. Further, it’s in the final couple of chapters where her insights are really brilliant. Here she argues for and explains how to build up and steward a common and ennobled culture in the classroom—instead of just “getting through the material” (69).

Building and stewarding common culture is how educators can ennoble students out of their pettiness and into a worthy “community committed to goodness, truth, and beauty” (71). And there are a number of pedagogical tools readily available in the classical teacher’s toolbox for accomplishing this task, all of which Gerth shows teachers how to use: “Liturgies, reciting historical prayers, singing hymns, reading and memorizing poetry, reading aloud, and reciting catechisms” (72). The appendices alone are arguably worth the price of the book.

I recommend Thoroughness and Charm to school teachers and homeschooling families alike, and without reservation. It’s a thoughtfully written and needful work that will help teachers of every grade level fulfill their noble calling of producing students characterized by virtue; and do so as the title suggests, with thoroughness and charm.

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There is no lack of interpretive enterprise when it comes to Erasmus’s In Praise of Folly. For more than 500 years, readers and scholars have suggested varying opinions about its meaning, opinions ranging from clandestine anti-Christian conspiracies to Erasmus being carried away by Lady Folly herself i.e., caught up in his own passionate enchantment with paradox.

Even from its debut in 1511, it drew the ire of many of his contemporaries, especially the Louvain divines. But, if we are to believe Erasmus himself, Thomas More, to whom “the trifle” was dedicated, and Girardus Listrius, whom Froben, the printer, commissioned to annotate the work, it is a serious work of Christian humanism originally meant for a private, learned audience. In his dedication to More, Erasmus calls his work a “kind of sporting wit,” a “sort of jocose raillery,” that would be mighty pleasing to men of More’s wit and affability, those who are “neither dull nor impertinent.”1

In a letter written in May of 1515, to Martin Dorp, a professor of philosophy at the University of Louvain, Erasmus defends his use of satire, explaining:

For reasons such as this I have persuaded myself to guard my writings from any harm-doing or vengeance and to avoid contaminating them with so much as a mention of evil. Nor did I have any intentions in the Folly different from those in my other works, although the method may have differed. In the Enchiridion I simply set down a design for Christian living. In the pamphlet The Education of a Prince I publicly advised in what subjects a prince ought to be instructed. In the Panegyric, using the form of a eulogy of the prince, I did in an oblique manner the very same thing that in the other book I did openly and directly. So for the Folly: the same thing was done there under the semblance of a jest as was done in the Enchiridion. I wanted to admonish, not to cause pain; to be of benefit, not to vex; to reform the morals of men, not to oppose them.2

Ironically, Dorp was persuaded of the humanist sensibilities after an additional letter from More vouched for the purpose of the work. And when Dorp died in 1525, it was Erasmus who wrote his epitaph.

The humanist impulse that Erasmus championed was moral and religious reform through education and literature instead of schism. And the key to understanding the Folly is recognizing the quality of “learned joking” amongst humanists who were deeply nourished in classical and Christian texts. David Kay asserts, “Folly proves herself a comically backward humanist who reads all the right classical texts, but draws the wrong conclusions, and undercuts her own assertions.”3

Thus, the struggle so many have trying to understand the Folly comes from the mixture of Greek and Latin allusions that are often inverted or misapplied in such a way only those familiar with the texts would recognize the joke. Consider her opening statements to the crowd where she mocks them as having ears like those Midas gave to Pan.4

Throughout “the course of her ironic oration on the indignity of man,” she either contradicts or misinterprets Cicero, Seneca, Plato, Aristotle, Quintilian, Homer, Lucian, and Horace.5

Erasmus’s Folly can be viewed as the apotheosis for what some advocates of a humanities education are so often apt to claim: that one of the chief reasons for reading the Great Books is so you can get the jokes.

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In lesson five, we’ll continue building our case by establishing causal arguments.

Keep in mind, we are seeking arguments that support our thesis—our main argument—the spine of our paper.

In classical rhetoric, we discover what can be said about a text, a character, an incident, or a phenomenon by way of stasis theory or topics of invention. For our purposes, there’s little need to emphasize the differences between stasis theory and topics of invention, but the distinction can be helpful in carrying out quality research.

Drawing from classical rhetoric, stasis theory is technically diagnostic (i.e., What are we arguing about or what is our point of disagreement?). Topics of invention, on the other hand, are generative. They help us discover what we can actually say about our subject.

Stasis Theory consists of:

1. Conjectural questions (i.e., did something happen?): Where is the evidence? Who are the witnesses? What is the likelihood: Is it possible? Is it probable? Is it likely? Is it certain?

2. Definition questions (i.e., what is it? / what is the problem?): What is its nature, genus, species, and/or properties? What is not included in the boundaries of its definitions?

3. Qualitative questions (i.e., what kind of thing is it? / how serious is the issue?): is it good/evil? is it just/unjust? is it expedient/inexpedient?

4. Jurisdictional or policy questions (Is this the right one?) Is this the right court? Is this the right person? Should action be taken? What should be done to solve the problem?

Following Cicero, who codified Aristotle’s common places or topics, there are five topics of invention: definition, comparison, relationship, circumstance, and testimony. In his book, The Office of Assertion, Scott Crider lays out the topics of invention as follows:

1. What is the definition of X? What are its characteristics, both general and specific.

2. What is the difference between X and Y? How are they different, and how are they alike, and to what degree?

3. What is the relationship between X and Y? cause and effect? antecedent and consequence? contraries or contradictions?

4. What are the circumstances of X? Is it impossible; is it improbable; is it probable; is it certain?

5. Is there any credible testimony that supports my argument? Is there an authority, a statistic, a law, a maxim, a precedent, or an example?

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In terms of academic writing, we can supply supporting arguments for our thesis by using causal arguments. Causal arguments belong to the relational category of inquiry in the topics of invention. What caused the phenomenon in question or what effects did it have?

In Gregory Roper’s book, Mastering the Four Arguments, he classifies the causal relationship question as stasis theory rather than a topic of invention. I suppose such a distinction is of little importance given our purposes here and because the various aspects of rhetorical arguments have been classified and organized differently at different periods of history, but I mention it only because the purposes of the questions matter in relationship to where we are in our research and writing.

Are we still diagnosing an argument to discover where the disagreement lies? Or, are we attempting to generate arguments by discovering what can be said truthfully about the phenomenon under consideration? In any case, Roper lists the following eight causal arguments which can be helpful in discovering the arguments that best support our thesis during our research process.

1. Proximate causes are those causes that happen just before the event under consideration.

2. Remote causes are those causes that contributed further back in the chain of events.

3. A necessary cause “is a factor that must be present for the effect to take place.”

4. A sufficient cause “is one that is enough all by itself to make and effect happen.”

5. Precipitating causes “are the final steps that, when all the other factors are in place, kick off the actual results.”

6. Contributing causes are those causes that are neither necessary or sufficient all by themselves.

7. Hidden causes are those causes which are either unknown or not understood.

8. Reciprocal causes are the looped causes, those which lead back to another cause and then back to themselves again.

When considering arguments, it must be recognized that causal arguments function in the logos domain rather than the ethos or pathos domains of persuasion. Thus, the logic for cause and effect must be both sound and valid. Roper suggests that in order for a causal argument to work well in it’s persuasive function, it must:

1. Describe fully the phenomenon or event under consideration.

2. Then either: lead the reader to understand the chain of events that led to the phenomenon or event or lead the reader to understand the effects that came out of the phenomenon or event.

3. While also eliminating any false causes, those factors that may appear to be part of the chain of causality but were in fact not part of it.1

Given the complexity of causal arguments, consider trying your hand at answering the following question by developing a causal argument: What prevented Odysseus from returning to his home in Ithaca before Telemachus reached manhood?

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In last week’s post, I suggested 10 reasons for studying philosophy. The first reason in my list asserts that the ability to philosophize (to study or practice philosophy) is the mark of an educated mind. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, to be educated is to be brought up, reared, or instructed in particular subjects or in a particular way.

Thus, it seems that to be educated in this sense is to be instructed in the proper modes of pursuing wisdom, which is why I am working through these ideas systematically and publicly—to be better instructed myself.

As the love and pursuit of wisdom, philosophy takes on many forms or methods; and, for my purposes, I am going to group these forms or methods into three categories: Inquiry, Reasoning, and Contemplation.

Each has its own advantage or purpose and each also assumes certain criteria are present (e.g., Maieutics assumes truth is known but unarticulated). One imperative of educating ourselves is to recognize in which form or category our pursuit of wisdom is functioning. To this end, I’ll begin my own inquiry by unpacking the categories and then methodically explaining and demonstrating a method or form within a particular category.

In the category of Inquiry we can identify three common Socratic methods: Maieutics, Dialectic, and Elenchus. All three are in the general sense “dialectical” but each have a slightly different function and purpose.

Maieutics is treated in Plato’s Sophist, but is perhaps best represented in his Theaetetus, where he compares this method of inquiry to that of midwifery (148e - 151a).

In Plato’s dialogue by the same name, Socrates introduces Theaetetus to his approach to philosophic inquiry by suggesting he is the son of “the good hefty midwife, Phaenarete—a name that means “she who brings virtue to light.” By comparing himself to a midwife, he makes several notable comparisons:

1. A midwife is beyond the child-rearing years herself; thus, now possessing the likeness of Artemis, the goddess of chastity and child-birth (among other things).

2. Because of her own experience, a midwife can best perceive whether her patient is pregnant or not.

3. Because of her craft, a midwife is able to bring on, delay, or miscarriage birth with her medicines and incantations

4. The midwife is also capable of proper matchmaking to know which couples are best situated to bring forth the best stock.

5. The midwife is able to determine if the birth is true or false offspring.

As we shall see, Socrates is not attending women and attempting to deliver their real babies. He is attending men and attempting to deliver the truth from their souls. Socrates tells Theaetetus:

Now my art of midwifery is just like theirs in most respects.The difference is that I attend men and not women, and that I watch over the labor of their souls, not of their bodies. And the most important thing about my art is the ability to apply all possible tests to the offspring, to determine whether the young mind is being delivered of a phantom, that is, an error, or a fertile truth. For one thing which I have in common with the ordinary midwives is that I myself am barren of wisdom. The common reproach against me is that I am always asking questions of other people but never express my own views about anything, because there is no wisdom in me; and that is true enough. And the reason of it is this, that God compels me to attend the travail of others, but has forbidden me to procreate. So that I am not in any sense a wise man; I cannot claim as the child of my own soul any discovery worth the name of wisdom. But with those who associate with me it is different. At first some of them may give the impression of being ignorant and stupid; but as time goes on and our association continues, all whom God permits are seen to make progress-a progress which is amazing both to other people and to themselves. And yet it is clear that this is not due to anything they have learned from me; it is that they discover within themselves a multitude of beautiful things, which they bring forth into the light. But it is I, with God’s help, who deliver them of this offspring. (150c-e)

The maieutic dialogue is similar to Socrates’ elenchus, but can be understood as being positive rather than negative. Where elenchus tries to deconstruct or challenge assumptions for the purpose of demonstrating knowledge is lacking or logic has failed, maieutics attempts to construct new ideas or uncover and recognize latent truth by answering potential objections and claims.

To think Christianly about education is to think generationally. The fact that generational thinking is foreign to so many Christian parents speaks to the cunning power of secular influence on modern Christian parenting and education.

Too many parents think they are hitting the mark because they support their children through college, and perhaps even to the marriage altar and a career. But that is only completing step one. Unless parents are thinking about properly educating their children’s children and preparing the way for the education of their children’s children yet unborn, they are not thinking Christianly and their work will ultimately fall short of the mark. To make my case, let’s turn to the Scriptures since they are the source of our standard for what it means to think Christianly. Consider the Maskil of Asaph in Psalm 78:

“Give ear, O my people, to my teaching; incline your ears to the words of my mouth! I will open my mouth in a parable; I will utter dark sayings from of old, things that we have heard and known, that our fathers have told us. We will not hide them from their children, but tell to the coming generation the glorious deeds of the Lord, and his might, and the wonders that he has done. He established a testimony in Jacob and appointed a law in Israel, which he commanded our fathers to teach to their children, that the next generation might know them, the children yet unborn, and arise and tell them to their children, so that they should set their hope in God and not forget the works of God, but keep his commandments; and that they should not be like their fathers, a stubborn and rebellious generation, a generation whose heart was not steadfast, whose spirit was not faithful to God.” -Psalm 78:1–8

The author of the Psalm is inviting the reader to contemplate the nature of education (i.e., what the fathers have passed down), the process of education (i.e., generational—with the third and fourth generation in mind), and the content of education (i.e., things heard and known, the glorious deeds, might, and wonder of the Lord), and the end of education (i.e., that the learners would set their hope in God and not be like their stubborn and rebellious ancestors who were not faithful and paid the consequences for their infidelity). The rest of the Psalm reveals the nature of their negligence and the consequences of not educating the subsequent generations.

“The Ephraimites, armed with the bow, turned back on the day of battle. They did not keep God’s covenant, but refused to walk according to his law. They forgot his works and the wonders that he had shown them.” -Psalm 78:9–11

The point of highlighting this passage about the Ephraimites is not to expound on the way Judah superseded them due to their disobedience (vss. 65-72 cf. 1 Samuel 4:1-11). That’s certainly true. But the point is to demonstrate the Ephraimites’ loss of blessing, their loss of affluence and flourishing, their loss of their inheritance and heritage because they forgot God’s works and wonders and turned back when it mattered the most.

Recall education is the process of passing on to the next generation the parent’s understanding of the nature of their world—a world made by God in whom their children should set their hope, a God whom their children should recall with wonder for his marvelous works, and a God whose commandments they willingly and cheerfully keep.

In short, if Christians are not thinking generationally, they are not thinking Christianly; and this grave error is going to be revealed first and foremost in the ultimate manifestation of their philosophy of education—where their grown children set their hope, whom their grown children obey, and whether their grown children have a philosophy of generational education.

“The words of the Preacher, the son of David, king in Jerusalem. Vanity of vanities, says the Preacher, vanity of vanities! All is vanity. What does man gain by all the toil at which he toils under the sun?” -Ecclesiastes 1:1–3

George Sanders was the voice actor behind the fearsome tiger, Shere Kahn, in Disney’s 1967 Jungle Book. By anyone’s standards he was a successful actor, starring in 126 movies, 10 television series, and a Broadway musical.

But for all his success, he failed to find a reason to live. In April of 1972, he shocked the world by committing suicide in a hotel near Barcelona by ingesting five bottles of barbiturates. He left behind three suicide notes which read:

Dear World, I am leaving because I am bored. I feel I have lived long enough. I am leaving you with your worries in this sweet cesspool. Good luck.

George Sanders wasn’t the first person to ever feel discouraged, fed up, or hopeless about his life and future. And, we can be certain he won’t be the last. The truth be told, at some time or other, and to one degree or other, most have entertained the idea of checking out of this sweet cesspool and wishing the rest of humanity a gallant Good luck!

Thus, our perspective today will make all the difference how we live and die, tomorrow.

In large part, gaining the proper perspective on life is what the book of Ecclesiastes is all about. We could properly call the book of Ecclesiastes a sermon attributed to, if not written by, Solomon, the second son of David and Bathsheba, and the third king of Israel. Solomon lived around the 10th century B.C. and in this sermon, he reflects on the meaning of life under the sun and concludes it is all worthless.

The word translated “Preacher” in the first verse is the Hebrew word Qoheleth. Some English translations of the Bible have chosen to leave the word untranslated because it carries so much more meaning than preacher in our modern sense of the word. It can also mean spokesman, philosopher, and teacher. But preacher is often preferable because as Philip Ryken explains, the role of qoheleth, along with the word’s etymology, is more like a pastor in a church than a teacher in a classroom. Ryken writes,

[Qoheleth] is preaching wisdom to a gathering of the people of God. This context is clearly reflected in the title this book is usually given in English. “Ecclesiastes” is a form of the Greek word ekklesia, which is the common New Testament word for “church.” An ekklesia is…a gathering or assembly of people for the worship of God. The word “ecclesiastes” is the Greek translation of the Hebrew word qoheleth. Literally, it means “one who speaks in the ekklesia”—that is, in the assembly or congregation. So Qoheleth is a title or nickname for someone who speaks in church. In a word, he is the “Preacher.”1

It was and still is a common literary practice to put a message in the mouth of a fine representative of the message; yet, there’s nothing substantial in the text to give us reason to doubt the author is actually who he claims to be. So whether or not the author is Solomon or just taking on the persona of Solomon for the purposes of his sermon he is asking, in essence, what is the point of all our work and struggle on this planet if everything is empty and meaningless?

Initially, his perspective sounds a lot like George Sanders’. However, by exploring this ancient work further, we learn some of the more profound secrets about the purpose of life and how we find significance and meaning as human beings in this vast universe.

As we enter a new resurrection year in the church calendar, some people unfortunately already have their perspective oriented pessimistically. They see through the same lens as George Sanders and conclude life is just not worth living anymore. Others may feel like trying harder to do better is a fool’s errand. Instead of killing themselves, however, they will continue their attempt to escape the pain by delving further into their favorite addiction (i.e., substance abuse, social media, porn, etc).

On the other hand, there are those who are optimistic about the future. The question is, though, on what foundation is their hope and optimism based? Careers, relationships, affluence and entertainment are all ephemeral; they will, like butterflies and soap bubbles, flit away in a moment, leaving those who trust in such things sad and empty. Real hope, real strength, real optimism for all of life comes as a result of envisioning life as a reality existing both under the sun, and above the sun, simultaneously. Only by being in the Son is such a reality possible for any of us.

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We were somewhere around the Armagosa Valley on a highway south of Area 51 when the delusion began to take hold. I remember saying something like, “I’m getting sleepy… maybe you should drive.”

And suddenly, there was a terrible cacophony all around us. Where once the glow of the Las Vegas Strip suffused the distant night sky with its amber-gold hues, it was now darkened by a swarm of apocalyptic bats, their wings flapping wildly as they circled above our heads, screeching, and dive bombing the car.

“Holy Jesus!” I shouted! “What are these infernal animals?” My heart pounded against my chest like a bent beater on a hand mixer set to high speed. One minute a glowing vision of excess and indulgence danced on the distant horizon like an aberration hovering seductively over her living lover; the next minute we were enveloped by a black hail storm of demonic raptors.

“What are you yelling about? Is everything okay? The kids are asleep!” Her voice groggy from being wakened suddenly nevertheless took the form of a strong steady whisper. Then, just as suddenly as they had appeared, the bats vanished into the darkness, their only trace a lingering sense of foreboding.

My wife adjusted herself back to a fully upright position and threw the pillow she’d been using on the floor behind her seat. Despite the chaos that had just moments ago been all around us, she was calm. She stared straight ahead for a minute gaining her lucidity with a look of grim determination.

“We’re almost there,” I said. My heart was still thumping violently as I glanced over at her.

“Please keep your eyes on the road and stop trying to kill us,” she said flatly, pulling her hair into a pony tail. She then pulled some lip balm from her bag and begin to apply it like she was about to arrive at her destination.

I scanned the night sky for the bats, or whatever the hellish creatures were. It was as if the seven seals of the Apocalypse had been opened right before my eyes and she just slept through it all.

I could now feel the ominous intensity of her stare on my face but I couldn’t tear my eyes away from the sky in front of us to look at her. “Did you doze?”

I shook my head. Suddenly, I wanted to argue with her. I wanted to protest against the madness of it all, but something in her gaze silenced me—a primal instinct that reminded me not to argue with her, no matter how irrational it all seemed.

“Maybe it was a sign, a sign that we’re on the right path,” I said and glanced in her direction. It was now her who was staring out into the night, scanning the sky for something she had yet to experience.

With a looming sense of trepidation, I let the glittering lights of Las Vegas draw us like a bug lite out of the darkness toward our unwitting demise. There was no turning back now, no retreat from the work that lay ahead. Despite what to me had seemed like the fourth trumpet of Revelation being blown, the kids slept on peacefully in the back seats of the van, visions of sugarplums no doubt dancing in their heads.

My wife, sitting beside me, remained calm, her eyes fixed ahead with a steely determination that mimicked my own fanaticism. I was, after all, a man of God, a pastor ordained by the laying on of hands. Our family had been sent out with the fervent prayers of the faithful. For years, I had been mentored in the ministry and had served with unwavering devotion, preaching the unadulterated truths of the King James Bible to all whom I could force to listen.

Now we had been commissioned to go out into the world on our own. We were missionaries, church planters on a mission to reach people in the heart of the fastest growing city in the nation. We just didn’t know it was the beginning of a pilgrimage, a savage journey, if you will, right into the very heart of our fundamentalism.

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I started reading The Intellectual Life: Its Spirit, Conditions, Methods in the fall of 2016. I said “started reading” the work because for nearly a decade now, I haven’t technically stopped reading it. Like most of my book hauls (when I can find them), I purchased this copy used, but in excellent shape. Save for some writing in the flyleaf and a few colored pencil annotations, it was “like new,” in every other respect when I got hold of it—solid binding and no damage to cover or pages. As it sits today, the binding is falling apart, the cover is falling off, and the pages are filled with numerous pencil marks and annotations. There’s no telling how many times I’ve been over its pages and it shows.

Born Antonin-Gilbert Sertillanges (16 November 1863 – 26 July 1948), the author, a French Dominican priest who took the name Antonin-Dalmace Sertillanges when he entered the Dominican Order, first published the work in French in 1921.

It was translated into English by Mary Ryan, and because of the author’s name change, it’s possible to find copies of his books identifying him as A. G. Sertillanges and copies identifying him as A. D. Sertillanges. My copy presents his name as the latter.

There are a few books in my library that I revisit often but this one is beloved because of the manner in which Sertillanges dignifies the life of the mind and honors the intellectual vocation of writing. I suppose I’ll never tire of being reminded that for the one who is called to the vocation of making good thinking visible, this labor is too consequential not to do it well.

Similar to the way the Holy Writ teaches us the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom, Sertillanges instructs his reader that in the intellectual world, the beginning of wisdom is ensuring one’s attention is freed from every inferior preoccupation that might draw him away from his sacred calling to participate in the truth conveyed to him by the universe (ix). Yet, simultaneously, the intellectual worker must “refuse to be a brain detached from its body, and human being who has cut out his soul” because he has made “a monomania of the work” (241).

At the heart of this little book is the message that the Intellectual worker has a sacred calling and that sacred calling requires a “response which, in one effort to surmount self, hears and consents”(xi). Likewise, the call is not without its means or its results. These too require the same virtue as the response to the call—selflessness, obedience, and good judgment; that is,

settling one’s way of living, one’s society, the organization of one’s time, the place to be given to contemplation and to action, to general culture and to one’s specialty, to work and to recreation, to necessary concessions and to stern refusals, to the concentration that strengthens the mind and the broader studies that enrich it, to aloofness and to contacts: contacts with men of genius, with one’s own group, with nature, or with others in general social life, and so forth. These things also can only be wisely judged of in the moment of ecstasy, when we are close to the eternally true, far from the covetous and passionate self. And when we have done our part, results and the measure of them will demand the same virtue of acceptance, the same selflessness, the same peace in a Will that is not ours. (xi)

Even if every aspect of Sertillanges’ instructions for intellectual workers doesn’t resonate, his broader message of thinking wisely and properly about the intellectual life—especially in our day of “influencers” and “content creators”—is quite possibly more relevant today than it was in 1921.

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To begin, it will be helpful for the reader to know that I’ll be using one of the many updated versions of John Wilson’s 1668 translation because it is in the public domain. However, from time to time, I will reference the paragraph numbers of Mortimer J. Adler’s Great Books Series translation (translated by Betty Radice), mostly for cross referencing.

Careful readers of Erasmus’s Moriae Encomium will recognize three movements within Folly’s speech. These movements are not mechanistic or definite, as if Folly offers her audience three points and a poem, but they are real and they are distinctly felt in Folly’s shifting tone and emphases.

Part 1

The first movement takes up the first half of the work, beginning with Lady Folly’s playful, seductive introduction and concluding with a proclamation of her generosity and goodness, which, comparatively, sets her apart from the other gods: She proclaims, the gods are more like

monsters of divinity, as had more of the hangman than the god in them, and were worshiped only to deprecate that hurt which used to be inflicted by them: I say, not to mention these, I am that high and mighty goddess, whose liberality is of as large an extent as her omnipotence: I give to all that ask: I never appear sullen, nor out of humor, nor ever demand any atonement or satisfaction for the omission of any ceremonious punctilio in my worship: I do not storm or rage, if mortals, in their addresses to the other gods pass me by unregarded, without the acknowledgment of any respect or application: whereas all the other gods are so scrupulous and exact… 1

In the Adler edition, the first movement runs from paragraphs 1-46.

Part 2

The second movement is Juvenalian social criticism. Folly shifts from her playful, carnivalesque nature to now speaking in a sharper, more satirical tone as she catalogs the sins and failures of fools and institutions. She says,

But lest I should seem to speak this with more of confidence than truth, let us take a nearer view of the mode of men’s lives, whereby it will be rendered more apparently evident what largesses I everywhere bestow, and how much I am respected and esteemed by persons from the highest to the lowest quality. For the proof whereof, it being too tedious to insist upon each particular, I shall only mention such in general as are most worthy the remark, from which by analogy we may easily judge of the remainder. 2

After enumerating the foolishness of the various estates—grammarians, rhetoricians, scholars, theologians, monks, preachers, princes, courtiers, bishops, popes, etc.—Folly winds down the second movement noting, “All this amounts to no less than that all mortal men are fools, even the righteous and godly as well as sinners.”3 In the Adler edition, the second movement runs from paragraphs 47-65.

Part 3

Folly’s third and final movement seems to balance the comedic (i.e., carnivalesque) and the tragic (i.e., biting satire) with the biblical and paradoxical Pauline foolishness (i.e., fools for Christ’s sake). Folly says, “But that I may not wear out this subject too far, to draw now towards a conclusion, it is observable that the Christian religion seems to have some relation to Folly, and no alliance at all with wisdom.”4 In the final section, Folly extols the madness and folly of Christianity, the true wisdom which appears foolish to the world. In the Adler edition, the third movement runs from paragraph 66 to the end of the encomium.

In sum, these three movements, taken together, are a rhetorical device which forms the reader’s moral imagination. Lady Folly draws in her listeners with playful seduction, exposes and sharply critiques the universal follies of society using biting satire, then concludes by pointing her audience to the philosophia Christi, the lived wisdom of the gospel—Christ imitated in humility and charity—which is foolishness to the world (cf. 1 Corinthians 1). The Praise of Folly isn’t sportive fiction Erasmus wrote just to pass the time on his trip to England (even though that’s how he presents the story in his letter to More); a careful reading suggests its a reimagined working of his Enchiridion presented to the wider world, but with a humane sense of mirth instead of the more serious tone he employed when writing the Enchiridion for the future Holy Roman Emperor Charles V.

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Now that we’ve determined that the thesis is the basis of our argument, an argument that can only be discovered out of a good research philosophy, and there are fundamental research methods that are profitable for discovering what can be argued, we now turn to the objective of this lesson—definition.

For those attentive to the list of questions in the Stasis Theory presented in the last lesson, you may remember the second kind of question in discovering what can be argued is “What is it?”—the definition questions. Cicero notably claimed that in order to understand the significance of a thing we have to know the attributes that are being ascribed to the thing.1 Sister Miriam Joseph, in her acclaimed book, The Trivium, remarks that “Definition makes explicit the intension or meaning of a term, the essence that it represents.”2

The tendency of the majority of students to whom I teach academic writing is to “Google” a word and grab the first definition that populates. In some rare cases, they may pull a physical dictionary off the bookshelf; yet, they often do the same thing. But, as C. S. Lewis noted in his book, Studies in Words, “We are often deceived. In an old author the word may mean something different. I call such senses dangerous senses because they lure us into misreadings.”3

One’s instinct might be to assume the reader understands what the writer means by a word and can “look it up” if not. But defining our terms is essential, not only for keeping everyone on the same page, but also as one of the most powerful arguments writers can make. Defining terms accurately and effectively establishes the boundaries of what needs to be proved and what doesn’t. It also means implicitly governing the nature and direction of the arguments supporting your thesis.

Trusting I have convinced you that definitions matter greatly, we can now turn to exploring the various kinds of definitions:4

Definition by Example:

This is the most informal type of definition and is not usually specific enough for most technical arguments. However, there are cases where it might be helpful to illustrate what you mean by pointing to an example.

Example: “A hotrod is that ‘57 Chevy Bel Air your dad has stored in your garage.”

Definition by Logic:

A logical definition expresses a thing’s essence by naming its genus (general category) and species (specific difference).

Example: “A human being is a rational animal.” Or, “A triangle is a three-sided polygon.”

Definition by Distinction:

A distinctive definition names a things by its essence and a property. In other words, its species is its genus (general category) plus property (an accident extending from its essence but not its essence.

Example: “Mankind is a being capable of sadness.” Here sadness is a property of man’s rational essence. Sadness is not his essence but he can only be sad because he can reason.

Definition by Operation:

An operational definition defines a thing apart from its essence. Instead it defines its nature or type by the observable effects or the measurable results either that it produces or that occurs in its presence.

Example: “Temperature is what a thermometer reads.” Or, “Learning is a measurable change in behavior following the relevant training.”

Definition by Cause:

A causal definition is similar to an operational definition but names the cause—any of the four causes: efficient, material, formal, final—which produced the reality the word being defined signifies.

Example: “A statue is a clay or stone formation created by a sculptor’s artistic craftsmanship.” Or, “An essay is a composition of a writer’s argument expressed with wisdom and eloquence.”

Definition by Description:

A descriptive definition is simply a careful enumeration of a thing’s characteristics.

Example: “A book is an object composed of written papers arranged for easy reading and bound on one side, between two covers.” Or, “A cat is a small four-footed animal covered in soft hair, usually with a long tail, pointed ears, whiskers, and sharp teeth, often domesticated as a family pet.”

Definition by Etymology:

An etymological definition is one that is obviously based on a word’s derivation. For example: Education derives from the Latin: educare / educere: e- (“out of”) + ducere (“to lead”). Thus, the literal sense of education is “to lead out.” But it must be noted that etymological definitions are notoriously problematic because a word’s present meaning often does not adhere to its etymological meaning.

Example: The English word nice means “pleasant; agreeable; satisfactory” according to the Oxford Languages Dictionary. But its etymology has an incredibly interesting story. According to the same Oxford Languages Dictionary, it derives from the Latin: nescire and nescius, which mean “to not know” and ignorant” respectively. It entered Middle English as ‘stupid’. It gave rise to ‘fastidious’ and ‘scrupulous’, which eventually led to the sense ‘fine’ and ‘subtle’, and to the main current senses of “pleasant; agreeable; satisfactory.”

Definition by Synonym:

Synonymous definitions are illustrative of the similar or near equivalent meanings words can symbolize. These too are helpful in the way Definitions of Example can be casually helpful. But synonyms always differ in nuanced ways, “usually either in the logical or in the psychological dimensions or in both.”5

Example: “His wife was frugal, but not stingy.” Or, “His wife turned their house into a home.” Even though we often use these examples interchangeably, in the first example, frugal is a virtue and stingy is a vice; and, in the second example, the house is a material structure and the home is relationally qualitative.

Even after doing the careful work of establishing definitions that are foundational to our arguments, it is essential that a writer recognize there are some important terms which will defy any of these definitional approaches. Such terms are usually technical or legal jargon that require a de facto or arbitrary definition established by some entity’s use of the term. For example, words like “larceny”or “resident” will be defined by various states or government agencies for legal purposes. In those cases, it’s necessary to rely on the documents defining those terms for definitional sources.

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We should scarcely call a person educated who knows nothing of the various ideas that have participated in the great conversation that has shaped the Western tradition. Each idea that has emerged as an influential force on a culture or society at a particular cultural moment did so as a result of the discovery of some real or perceived truth by way of dialectic, investigation, or in some cases, revelation.

To a large degree, to philosophize is to discern between good ideas and bad ideas, to trace the paths of discovery and conversation that led to and emerged from said ideas, and to try to understand the truth of things as they stand.

While I would argue this is the primary meaning of philosophize in the modern sense, to say so is itself a philosophic decision because the meaning of the word philosophy has varied in time and context. C. S. Lewis notably uses the word philosophy as an example when he warns his readers of the dangers of misunderstanding a word’s meaning and then misapplying it in a foreign context. In his book, Studies in Words, he explains:

The dominant sense of any word lies uppermost in our minds. Wherever we meet the word, our natural impulse will be to give it that sense. When this operation results in nonsense, of course, we see our mistake and try over again. But if it makes tolerable sense our tendency is to go merrily on. We are often deceived. In an old author the word may mean something different. I call such senses dangerous senses because they lure us into misreadings. In examining a word I shall often have to distinguish one of its meanings as its dangerous sense, and I shall symbolise this by writing the word (in italics) with the letters d.s. after it. Thus, since…philosophy (d.s.) means ‘philosophy in the sense of metaphysics, epistemology, logic, etc. as distinct from the natural sciences’—the sense we are in danger of reading into it when old writers actually mean by it just science.1

Lewis means that we need to be careful about imposing our modern definitions on older writers’ use of words because frequently they don’t mean the same thing. In using the word philosophy, for example, older writers often mean something like our modern use of the word science (i.e., the pursuit of rational knowledge) rather than the narrower field of abstract inquiry (i.e. ethics, metaphysics, or epistemology, etc.).

With this in mind, let me perform the first duty of a good philosopher and provide a working definition of philosophy before offering 10 good reasons to study it.

The word philosophy derives from the Greek philosophia “love of knowledge, pursuit of wisdom; systematic investigation,” from philo- “loving” (see philo-) + sophia “knowledge, wisdom,” from sophis “wise, learned;”2 To provide some additional context, in relation to ancient Christianity, the term philosophy (love of wisdom) refers to the various ways Greek thought, starting from the 6th c. BC, seeks to understand and explain the realities (truths) and the meaning of the cosmos.3

Ten Brief Reasons for Studying Philosophy

1. Following collective classical thought (i.e., Plato, Aristotle, Cicero), the ability to philosophize (to study and/or practice philosophy) is the mark of an educated person.

2. In its original sense (philo + sophia), philosophy is the pursuit and unification of truth in the service of wisdom and this is something every human being should pursue.

3. The practice of philosophy disciplines the faculties of the mind (i.e., it teaches us to ask the right questions, order our thoughts, etc.)

4. Following Plato in The Republic, philosophy is a kind of moral formation since it orders the soul toward the Good.

5. Following Socrates, philosophy prepares us to die well by helping us discover what matters most in our living.

6. Following Aristotle, philosophy cultivates wonder since all men desire to know.

7. Following the medieval Scholastics, philosophy is the foundation for all the other disciplines, especially theology.

8. Good philosophy challenges assumptions and exists to answer bad philosophy according to C. S. Lewis.

9. Following Boethius, philosophy liberates our hearts and minds, even when our bodies are captive.

10. Following Anselm (and others), philosophy leads us to understand and love God, the one in whom nothing greater can be conceived, and in whom our faith rests.

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The Stuff of Stones are meditations on philosophy and culture. C. S. Lewis wrote that "Good philosophy must exist, if for no other reason, because bad philosophy needs to be answered." Often attributed to Thomas Aquinas, “The purpose of the study of philosophy is not to learn what others have thought, but to learn how the truth of things stands.” I’m taking the title of this column from Richard Wilbur’s clever and charming little poem titled, “Epistemology.”

If education, in its most generic sense, is the “process of passing on to the next generation the parents’ understanding of the nature of their world,”1 then what parents believe matters. It also matters who writes the curriculum. It would be silly at best and a betrayal at worst if parents who believed the earth was f…

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A concise answer to the questions before us might be found in Robert Hutchins’ Preface to The Great Conversation. He writes,

Until lately the West has regarded it as self-evident that the road to education lay through great books. No man was educated unless he was acquainted with the masterpieces of his tradition. There never was very much doubt in anybo…

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