Cosmos or Chaos: Words Create Worlds
Part 4 - Dorothy Sayers and Conclusion
“In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God…And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us…”
—John 1:1, 14
Read Part 1 - J. R. R. Tolkien: Words Create Worlds
Read Part 2 - Richard Weaver and Ideas Have Consequences
Read Part 3 - C. S. Lewis and The Abolition of Man
[Portrait of Dorothy Sayers by British photographer Howard Coster (1938)]
The rediscovery of Dorothy Sayers’ essay on “The Lost Tools of Learning" was one of the chief catalysts for the modern Classical Christian Education renaissance. Her compelling essay presents a provocative critique of modern education and advocates for returning to a medieval liberal arts pedagogy, specifically the recovery of the Trivium as it contains the foundational tools for learning.
At the heart of her critique is consternation over the failure of modern education to adequately prepare students to handle words skillfully and thoughtfully. The result is a generation of ill-equipped individuals who are unable to manage the constant flood of linguistic and rhetorical manipulation inherent in modern English society. Fundamentally, her critique, like that of Weaver’s and Lewis’s, highlights the power inherent in words.
According to Sayers, words are not loose symbols with ambiguous meaning, but dynamic terms referent to precise realities whose usage have profound implications for human thought and societal order. While the modern educator may scorn the medievalist for obsessive hair-splitting over connotation, at least the medieval reader was “defensively armored by his education as to be able to cry: ‘Distinguo,’” argues Sayers.
Modern students are forced to go out into the world linguistically unarmed at a time when it has never been more necessary to be so armed. Sayers proclaims,
For we let our young men and women go out unarmed, in a day when armor was never so necessary. By teaching them all to read, we have left them at the mercy of the printed word. By the invention of the film and the radio, we have made certain that no aversion to reading shall secure them from the incessant battery of words, words, words. They do not know what the words mean; they do not know how to ward them off or blunt their edge or fling them back; they are a prey to words in their emotions instead of being the masters of them in their intellects. We who were scandalized in 1940 when men were sent to fight armored tanks with rifles, are not scandalized when young men and women are sent into the world to fight massed propaganda with a smattering of "subjects"; and when whole classes and whole nations become hypnotized by the arts of the spell binder, we have the impudence to be astonished. We dole out lip‐service to the importance of education—lip‐service and, just occasionally, a little grant of money; we postpone the school‐leaving age, and plan to build bigger and better schools; the teachers slave conscientiously in and out of school hours; and yet, as I believe, all this devoted effort is largely frustrated, because we have lost the tools of learning, and in their absence can only make a botched and piecemeal job of it.
In this provocative excerpt, Sayers underscores just how potent and pervasive language really is: it literally shapes cultural perceptions, beliefs, and behaviors. The failure of modern education to equip students with the linguistic and rhetorical competence to critically engage with language leaves them vulnerable to manipulation through propaganda and advertising. If it was a troubling reality in Sayers’s day, how much more pertinent is her admonition in today's digitally saturated society?
The power of words, for Sayers, thus necessitates rigorous education in rhetoric and writing. Without these tools, students remain intellectually defenseless. This means making a proper distinction between “education” that merely imparts knowledge of “subjects” and education that trains students in the liberating arts of grammar, logic, and rhetoric.
For Sayers, the medieval Trivium is precisely the pedagogy for equipping students with the ability to master language at every level. Although her attempt to tie a child’s three stages of development—the Poll‐Parrot, the Pert, and the Poetic—to an individual corresponding art of the Trivium has come under scrutiny in recent years, as a “rough‐and‐ready” approximation, her claim is at least helpful for visualizing the work of recovering a profitable language education.
Nevertheless, Sayers’ conjoins the Poll-parrot stage (the ages prior to puberty) with grammar, arguing that at this stage of a child’s development,
learning by heart is easy and, on the whole, pleasurable; whereas reasoning is difficult and, on the whole, little relished. At this age, one readily memorizes the shapes and appearances of things; one likes to recite the number‐plates of cars; one rejoices in the chanting of rhymes and the rumble and thunder of unintelligible polysyllables; one enjoys the mere accumulation of things.
In its correspondence to the Poll-parrot stage, grammar provides the basic structures of language and vocabulary necessary to engage meaningfully with ideas.
Sayers corresponds the Pert stage (onset of puberty) with dialectic or logic. The Pert stage, building on the Poll-parrot stage “(and, naturally, overlaps it to some extent), is characterized by contradicting, answering back, liking to "catch people out" (especially one's elders); and by the propounding of conundrums. Its nuisance‐value is extremely high.” Dialectic sharpens the student’s reasoning faculties, cultivating clear thinking, precise argumentation, and the identification of logical fallacies.
Finally, Sayers corresponds the Poetic stage with rhetoric because this art teaches eloquent, persuasive, and elegant communication. Rhetoric vests the students with the ability to articulate their thoughts effectively and persuasively in both spoken and written form. The “Poetic age,” Sayers argues,
is popularly known as the ‘difficult’ age. It is self-centered; it yearns to express itself; it rather specializes in being misunderstood; it is restless and tries to achieve independence; and, with good luck and good guidance, it should show the beginnings of creativeness; a reaching out towards a synthesis of what it already knows, and a deliberate eagerness to know and do some one thing in preference to all others.
Ultimately, Sayers' essay is a compelling plea to restore language, rhetoric, and writing to the central role of education. She convincingly demonstrates that words wield immense power, shaping individuals' intellects and societies' collective discourse. The failure to adequately equip students with rhetorical competence and linguistic precision leaves them vulnerable to manipulation and unable to engage or contribute meaningfully to public life. For Sayers, forsaking or neglecting the essential tools of learning is to risk intellectual impoverishment and cultural deterioration.
Weaver reminds us that words are fundamentally tied to metaphysical realities. In classical Christian traditions, words embody reason itself, aligning humanity’s reason with the eternal Logos. Lewis reminds us it is the duty of educators to inculcate in students just sentiments—unsentimental sentiment—because words ultimately connect humans to universal truths, objective realities he identifies as the Tao. For her part, Sayers reminds us that in the age where the manipulative onslaught of words plays powerful games with our perceptions of reality, students need to be armed with linguistic and rhetorical competence. For this to happen, we must recover the lost tools of learning found in medieval pedagogy.
Collectively, Weaver’s, Lewis’, and Sayers’ admonitions serve to urge a recovery of a proper view of language’s sacred power, and encouraging the continued, concerted efforts of classical educators to restore rhetorical training to its foundational role in modern education before the recovery of rational public discourse is impossible and the barbarization of society is inevitable.
Weaver, Lewis, and Sayers offer potent, prophetic warnings against neglecting the divine aspect inherent in our words. For the classical Christian educator, "In the beginning was the Word," invokes an entire philosophical tradition from the ancient world with which John’s Gospel was meant to resonate. But, in John’s case, the Word became flesh and that had eternal implications for the cosmos, and for humanity.
Thus, the challenge before classical Christian educators is clear and urgent: to restore to words their rightful dignity, aligning linguistic practice with metaphysical reality. Our stewardship of language cultivates cosmos or condemns society to chaos. This is our sacred trust: to remember that words, when wielded responsibly, create worlds where human beings can flourish.
Bibliography
Aquinas, Thomas. Summa Theologica. Translated by Fathers of the English Dominican Province. London: Burns Oates & Washbourne, n.d.
Lewis, C. S. The Abolition of Man: Or, Reflections on Education with Special Reference to the Teaching of English in the Upper Forms of Schools. New York, NY: HarperCollins Publishers, 2001.
Sayers, Dorothy. “The Lost Tools of Learning.” Escondido: Escondido Tutorial Service, n.d.
Tolkien, J. R. R., Humphrey Carpenter, and Christopher Tolkien. 2000. The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co.
——— and Christopher Tolkien. 2006. The Monsters and the Critics and Other Essays. London: Harper Collins.
Weaver, Richard M. Ideas Have Consequences. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2013.
The Westminster Confession of Faith. Oak Harbor, WA: Logos Research Systems, Inc., 1996.