"The end of learning is to repair the ruins of our first parents by regaining to know God aright, and out of that knowledge to love him, to imitate him, to be like him." For well over a decade, the ACCS has hosted Repairing the Ruins, a name taken from this passage. In this letter, Milton offers us a sort of elegant simplicity that begins at "the end.”

 Milton’s educational proposal revolves around "knowledge." By tracing backward from Milton to the earliest origins of Christendom, we can find the essential feature of classical Christian education—not at its beginning, but at the axis of Western civilization, circa 1200 AD. This era is the center point at which the ancient classical world was sustained, and from which the influence of high Christendom emerged.

 Education happens when one comprehends knowledge and conforms to that knowledge—sometimes phrased "the cultivation of wisdom and virtue." I'm occasionally challenged: "So you think all education is reduced to knowledge?" I think our understanding of the word "knowledge" has shallowed a bit since the ancient and medieval world created the educational form we seek to restore. Boethius pointed out distinctions between human knowledge and divine perception. Alcuin saw knowledge broadly and as a path to virtue. Anselm viewed knowledge broadly as the pursuit of God's eternal truth. Aquinas gave us, perhaps, the most intriguing and accurate view of knowledge as an imprint of reality in ourselves: "To know is in some way to have the form of the known thing in the knower" [De Veritate (Q1, A.9)]. Aquinas's view comports with Webster's 1887 definition: “[Knowledge is] a clear and certain perception of that which exists, or of truth and fact.”  From this compilation of Western thought, we can say that knowledge regards an accurate comprehension of reality in all of its dimensions of truth, goodness, and beauty, both of the temporal and the divine.

 What about evil reality? Do we teach conformance to that? Evil is never “real.” As Augustine tells us in the Confessions, "I inquired what wickedness was; and I found it not to be a substance, but a perversity of the will turned aside from thee" [Book VII, Chapter 12]. He repeats this idea in the City of God: "For evil has no nature of its own; rather, it is the absence of good which has received the name ‘evil’" [Book XI, Chapter 9]. The really real is always good, so the one who conforms to it is virtuous.

Is this too simplistic? Far from the "ghastly simplicity" of the green book's angle on virtue in The Abolition of Man, Lewis points to an elegant simplicity in the medieval model of knowledge as it led to virtue in The Discarded Image. This complexity arose as, "They cared more for the intellectual pattern into which the facts could be fitted than for the facts themselves… The tendency was to accept everything in the auctores [authorities], to fit everything into the scheme somehow or other, even if only as an ‘exception’ which was just as much part of the scheme as the rule" [Discarded Image, chapter 6]. The medievals came by their love of categorizing facts and detail early on, some say because they depended upon the Vulgate. The Latin term for knowledge, "scientia," carries with it the characteristically Roman idea of being systematized, organized, and intellectual. During the time of the medieval scholastics, the Greek texts were rediscovered and knowledge expanded to "gnosis" which has a broader cosmology, is experiential, and is often mystical. This fusion of cosmological meaning asserted a much more encompassing, pervasive view of knowledge. By Lewis's reckoning, "[for the medievals] The universe… was not a machine… but an organism, a thing that lived… and every part of it had its meaning and its place” [EBID]. This holistic view of knowledge casts light in every corner of reality.

We comprehend this knowledge of reality in several ways—by experience (poetic), by imitation (mimetic), by reason (dialectic or contemplative), or by direct instruction (the written or spoken word from authority). As we pursue knowledge through these means, we remember that knowledge is never enough. “Knowledge puffs up,” Paul tells us in 1 Cor. 8. But then, what else is required? How ought we to know rightly? By loving, Paul tells us. Education seeks to bring students to love and conform with the true knowledge of God and His creation. This is paideia. A virtuous student is one who, through the affections of the heart and knowledge in the mind, conforms to reality. Put another way, the good student worships God in spirit (love) and truth (knowledge) [John 4].

Charter schools, public schools, or any type of school that teaches from a constrained, restricted view of reality cannot succeed at education’s ultimate aim: virtue. Aristotle, Marcus Aurelius, Epictetus, and even Ayn Rand, offer a version of “virtue” based in what they call “reality,” but their “reality” is tied only to reason or nature. Without “Theology as the Queen of the Sciences,” the student is left with a fractional knowledge of reality—lacking its power. And, without that real knowledge, his affections will become disordered. Virtue becomes hobbled to nature and dissipates into pragmatism. 

As Christianity grew in influence after late antiquity, virtue started to look more like “conformance with God’s reality.” Gregory of Nyssa describes virtue as "the participation of the soul in God" [The Life of Moses, Book II]. Elsewhere, he positions virtue as the soul's natural possession before the fall. If we are to believe Milton, all true education begins with the knowledge of God. “Virtue" is not a behavior, but an innate quality of a person or thing. Our task as educators is to teach students to probe the depths of knowledge using the liberal arts, and seek to instill a love of that knowledge in their chests. 

David Goodwin is the President of the Association of Classical Christian Schools (ACCS) and co-author of Battle for the American Mind, as well as an upcoming book, Forging the American Mind.

davidgoodwin.substack.com

ClassicalChristian.org

BattlefortheAmericanMind.com

classicaldifference.org

@goodwind67 on X

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