Spelunking With Plato

In this conversation we take up Shakespeare’s nearly infinite capacity to educate liberally all who encounter his works in deep and sustained ways. We also consider how Shakespeare liberally educates us in ways that complement how Dante teaches us. With particular attention to As You Like It, we examine how play—the play of supposition and the play of analogy—can be transferred to the classroom by the best teachers.  Along the way, we consider the contributions to this topic made by Pieper, Huizinga, Gadamer, Sister Miriam Joseph, and Altman.

Links of Potential Interest:

John Huizinga, Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play-Element in Culture

Josef Pieper, Leisure the Basis of Culture

Hans Georg Gadamer, The Relevance of the Beautiful and Other Essays

Sister Miriam Joseph, Shakespeare's Use of the Arts of Language

Joel Altman, The Tudor Play of Mind: Rhetorical Inquiry and the Development of Elizabethan Drama

In this conversation with Dr. Clint Brand, we explore what we can learn about liberal learning from Dante’s Divine Comedy. Taking Scott Crider’s recent essay on Dante as our point of departure, we explore how we might read the Commedia as “a series of pedagogical encounters.”  What can we discover about the roles of humility, wonder, love, the soul, dialectic, piety, poetry, and “submission to the real” in the growth of metamorphosis of liberal learning?  What lessons from Dante might we as teachers take into our own classrooms?

Links of potential interest:

Scott Crider’s “Saving Pedagogy: Dante as the Poet of Education” at Public Discourse

Dante’s Commedia (Paradiso)

Boethius, The Consolation of Philosophy

C. S. “Men Without Chests,” in The Abolition of Man

Plato’s Seventh Letter

Newman, Rise and Progress of Universities

Jean Leclercq O.S.B, The Love of Learning and the Desire for God

Clint Brand, ed., St. Gregory’s Prayer Book

In this conversation with Rachel Fulton Brown, we begin with Mary, the Seat of Wisdom, as a medieval symbol of liberal learning at the University of Paris, and all that she can teach those who desire to become wise.  From there we consider how a Marian thread unites things as disparate as iambic pentameter, rose windows, and the highest—albeit unexpected—gifts of contemplative grace. Along the way the works of St. Augustine, John of Garland, Richard of Saint-Laurent, Tolkien, and Josef Pieper illuminate our path.

Links of Potential Interest

Brown's U. Chicago Website

Rachel Fulton Brown, From Judgment to Passion: Devotion to Christ and the Virgin Mary, 800-1200

Rachel Fulton Brown, History in the Comic Mode: Medieval Communities and the Matter of Person

Rachel Fulton Brown, Mary and the Art of Prayer: The Hours of the Virgin in Medieval Christian Life and Thought

Rachel Fulton Brown at First Things

Fencing Bear at Prayer and here

"The Forge of Tolkein" (Lectures)

St. Augustine, De musica

Tolkien, Mythopoeia

Ecclesiasticus 24 (Mary as Wisdom)

John of Garland, Epithalamium beatae Mariae Virginis

Josef Pieper, Happiness and Contemplation

In this conversation with Rachel Fulton Brown, we undertake a wide-ranging conversation about history and liberal learning, ranging from Herodotus, Augustine, and Martianus Capella to McLuhan and MacIntyre with many stops in between. Among the questions we consider: How does the Christian approach to liberal learning—and history within it—stand both at odds and in parallel with the ancient understanding? How is history always opposed to abstraction? And what are the frames that can guide (or derail) the writing of professional history and our personal histories?

Links of Potential Interest

Brown's U. Chicago Website

Rachel Fulton Brown, From Judgment to Passion: Devotion to Christ and the Virgin Mary, 800-1200

Rachel Fulton Brown, History in the Comic Mode: Medieval Communities and the Matter of Person

Rachel Fulton Brown, Mary and the Art of Prayer: The Hours of the Virgin in Medieval Christian Life and Thought

Rachel Fulton Brown at First Things

Fencing Bear at Prayer and here

"The Forge of Tolkein" (Lectures)

Peter Novick, That Noble Dream: The 'Objectivity Question' and the American Historical Profession

Marshall McLuhan, The Classical Trivium: The Place of Thomas Nashe in the Learning of His Time

In this conversation with Margarita Mooney, we consider what can we learn from the Benedictine tradition—as communicated by Newman—as we seek to cultivate a university that is animated by liberal learning. What kind of ethos should emerge within a university from a liberal education that (1) integrates the full range of disciplines--including metaphysics and theology--(2) that seeks to form the full person (understood to have both a created nature and transcendent telos), and that (3) understands that for liberal learning to reach its highest aims it must be integrated within a liturgical and spiritual tradition? Within this discussion we also consider the difference that beauty, as a constitutive element of our education and our lives, can make as seek a fully human existence.  And on a note that is more important than it might seem at first, why should wee have good food and drink at faculty and academic gatherings?

Links of Potential Interest: 

Margarita Mooney Suarez’s writings, via her personal website

Scala Foundation

Mooney et al., The Love of Learning: Seven Dialogues on the Liberal Arts

David Brooks, “The Organization Kid”

Leclercq, The Love of Learning and the Desire for God

Newman, The Benedictine Essays

What is liberal education? And what is it not? In this conversation Margarita Mooney Suarez introduces her vision of liberal learning by considering the nature of the person whom we educate, the means of liberal learning, and the challenges that liberal learning faces today. Along the way, we consider what role imitation, play, humor, and imagination fulfill in liberal education and what we might continue to learn from Maritain, Newman, Huizinga, and St. Benedict. And how do all of these elements and sources enable us to (1) educate the integrated human person who possesses both a transcendent dimension and telos, (2) attain an integrated vision of all things, and (3) enter into the dance that transports us between focused forms of knowing—through the disciplines—and the contemplative vision of the whole?

Links of Potential Interest:

Margarita Mooney Suarez's personal website

Scala Foundation

Abigail Adams Institute

Newman, The Idea of a University, Rise and Progress of Universities, and The Benedictine Essays

Huizinga, Homo Ludens

Maritain, Education at the Crossroads

In this conversation Prof. Mirela Oliva takes up the big question of how we can come to know the meaning of life. She suggests that there are three questions bound up in one: (1) the cosmic question, “What is the meaning ‘of it all’?”; the ethical question, “What can I do to make my life meaningful?”; and the aesthetic question, “What is the story of my life?” (And who “writes” this story?)

She also takes up related questions such as “Is the meaning of life outside of me?” “Is the purpose of my life given to me, or do I create my own?” And finally, we discuss the question, “Is there a Catholic philosophy?” and what Plato might teach us about a philosophy that requires the exclusion of the Divine.

Resources to consider:

Plato, Republic

Augustine, On the Trinity

Aquinas, Summa Theologiae

Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method

Viktor Frankl, Man's Search for Meaning

Robert Nozick, The Examined Life: Philosophical Explanations

Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue

John Martin Fischer, Our Stories: Essays on Life, Death, and Free Will

Films: Truman Show, The Story of Adele. H.

Mirela Oliva, "Gadamer and Theology"

Mirela Oliva, "Causation and the Narrative Meaning of Life"

If Plato's Cave had Wi-Fi and Netflix, would we leave it?

In this conversation with Prof. Mirela Oliva, we consider what it is that a philosopher "does" and the famous Allegory of Plato's Cave. Are we all trapped in this Cave? Under what conditions might we be willing to stay?

We also consider: How can the search for knowledge and wisdom lead to a better life? And what role does humility play in our search? How is knowledge of reality—philosophy broadly understood—the basis of every other enquiry and form of professional knowledge? That is, how is it that we cannot know the part (i.e., our particular discipline or profession) without knowing the whole (i.e., a broad philosophical vision)? And finally, what does it mean to approach a discipline philosophically?  (The last question is of critical importance for all who aspire to be liberally educated.)

Resources to consider:

Plato, Republic

Augustine, On the Trinity

Aquinas, Summa Theologiae

Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method

Viktor Frankl, Man's Search for Meaning

Robert Nozick, The Examined Life: Philosophical Explanations

Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue

John Martin Fischer, Our Stories: Essays on Life, Death, and Free Will

Films: Truman Show, The Story of Adele. H.

How can the study of history, understood as a branch of liberal learning, become a liberating education? Prof. Francesca Guerri offers an initial answer by giving us an account of her own intellectual and spiritual pilgrimage and the role of the study of history in that pilgrimage.

Then, opening the discussion to more universal connections, Dr. Guerri takes up the themes of friendship, the nature of the human person, and the role that community and companionship play in teaching and the intellectual life of the university.  She also considers how history relates to the sister disciplines of liberal learning and how historical study can be a point of entry for students into a larger vision of reality that is coherent, intelligent, and ultimately teleological.  History, approached as a discipline within the Catholic intellectual tradition offers meaning and vision that can liberate us and for which we are ultimately responsible as caretakers.

Links of Potential Interest:

Dr. Guerri’s website

Polybius, The Rise of the Roman Empire

Chris Blum, “The Historian’s Tools,” Logos: A Journal of Catholic Thought and Culture 13, no. 4 (2010): 15-34.

Christopher Dawson

Crossroads Cultural Center

What is one of the chief motivations for the study of history? Prof. Francesca Guerri suggests that it is “a passion for humanity.” But this is not a passion for abstractions. It is rather a passion for particular people, at particular times, in particular places, ordered to a particular end.

In this conversation, Dr. Guerri introduces us to Matilda of Tuscany and her role in the investiture controversy as well as her own studies of Renaissance mercantile life and the larger (Benedictine) vison of work as potentially sacred.

Dr. Guerri also takes up the question of the nature of liberal learning by considering a statement that Dante gives to Ulysses in the Inferno: “Consider your origins: you were not made to live as brutes, but to follow virtue and knowledge.” Is this an accurate description of liberal learning and its aims? What does it mean that Ulysses uses this statement to exhort his men to transgress divine bounds, leading ultimately to their death and his own damnation? (Are there dangers lurking with liberal education that is unmoored from a divine and regulative vision?)

Along the way, Dr. Guerri also considers the virtues—including patience and studiositas—that should animate the life of the historian and the discipline’s relationship to the other liberal arts, especially rhetoric as it is understood in of the works of Cicero, St. Augustine, and Dante.

Links of Potential Interest:

Dr. Guerri’s website: https://www.francescaguerri.com/

Crossroads Cultural Center:  http://www.crossroadsculturalcenter.org/

Christopher Dawson:  http://www.christopherdawson.org.uk/

St. Augustine, The City of God:  https://www.newcitypress.com/the-city-of-god-11-22-library-edition.html

Dante’s Inferno: https://www.amazon.com/Inferno-Divine-Comedy-Dante/dp/034548357X. 

A popular introduction to Matilda of Tuscany:  https://www.catholic.com/magazine/online-edition/matilda-of-tuscany-the-warrior-countess