Doxological Pedagogy (Part Six)

The Schoolroom of the Stars

We need to begin this next part of the discussion by further clarifying something that was said toward the end of the previous post. In the Convivio, Dante pictures the liberal arts as a hierarchy, where each sphere prepares the student for the subsequent sphere, leading from Grammar to Moral Philosophy and, ultimately, to Theology. In terms of a student’s own capacity to understand, this makes sense. The more complicated spheres are higher up, and are suited to those students who have already worked through the more fundamental and preparatory subjects, such as Grammar and Logic. This maps the linear approach (a child’s actual education in time) onto the hierarchical approach (as pictured in the Convivio). And as far as that goes, it is a helpful way of understanding education. We move from what is simple and basic, to what is more complicated and intricate. So far, so good.

But in another sense, much as the eight lower spheres do not support or give existence to the primum mobile, but rather (in both Aristotelian and Ptolemaic cosmology) are themselves moved by the ninth sphere, so too the liberal arts do not lead to moral philosophy, but are themselves given unity and coherence by it, by a rightly ordered love of wisdom. Even if a student is not yet able to grasp the technical workings of a full-orbed moral philosophy, he is still operating within one. Every subject is governed and shaped by the moral framework of the culture. Ultimately, as Christians understand, it is the Empyrean, the light and truth of God, seen through the grid of a biblical moral philosophy that defines everything we ought to do, everything we ought to think, everything we ought to know. This is the final end that governs our memory, understanding, and love. And so, even though a Grammar student may not be able to articulate the finer points of moral philosophy, let alone complex theological issues, in his Grammar studies he is still being governed (or to use the language of the spheres, moved) by the primum mobile (right philosophy) which itself is moved by the Empyrean (God Himself).

Put another way, we necessarily see and understand every subject through a preexisting and inherited lens. To the extent that we assume the governing philosophy, the governing paradigm with which we are born is correct, we stand with Plato and Rousseau. The reality of original sin, the inherited posture of rebellion against God, means we are born secularists. We are born rejecting God, and placing self on the throne of our experience. Our first defining philosophy is one that sees self as the highest end of every subject. And if that philosophy is not corrected by the Gospel, by the plain teaching of Scripture, by the embrace of the true end of all man’s yearning, it will continue to taint and corrupt our understanding of every other sphere of learning. However, with a proper, biblically grounded (and grounding) philosophy, with a true love for wisdom, and wisdom as defined by the fear of the Lord, we will be equipped to understand the true nature of every subject, to see Christ at the center of every sphere of learning, and in this way, grow to love Him more and more.

In the first two canticles of the Commedia, Vergil stands in the place of the donna gentile, as the representative of all that is truly good and right within the scope of human understanding — man, supported by common grace, at his most virtuous. Thus, when they reach the summit of Mount Purgatory, Dante has reached the apex of human virtue. He has come to hate the distorted loves and fraudulent perversions he witnessed in Hell. The seven deadly sins have been purged away. And yet, one thing still remains. He is still incomplete, for the lessons of Hell and Purgatory are not sufficient in themselves. Mere moments after Vergil departs and Dante is left standing before Beatrice, she severely scolds him because he had failed to understand what virtue, beauty, and love was all for. He had been satisfied with signposts, and forgotten the destination, which is God. Though he confessed faith, he had been living like his recently departed master, like a virtuous pagan. Externally sound and righteous, but without the heart of the matter guiding his will. Remember the episode quoted in the introduction, that it was only the promise of Beatrice (and, tellingly, not the promise of God) that motivated Dante to walk through the final fire of purgation. This heavenward orientation, the power to direct the will as he ought, is the lesson he must learn in Paradise. 

At her words, Dante is bowled over by shame. He had assumed his training thus far was sufficient. And if the point was merely to see Beatrice, it would have been. But to see Beatrice again was not why Dante was rescued from the dark wood. And it is this complacency that Beatrice excoriates in Dante. This is the import of her obscure and difficult speech before bringing him into the heavens; she has been severe 

“So that you may perceive,” she said, “that school
you have followed, and see how its teaching
is able to follow after my speech;
that you may see your ways are as distant
from the Divine, as the earth is different
from the heaven that hastens most on high.”
(Purgatorio XXXIII.85-90) 

In other words, the pilgrim Dante was content with his moralism, his philosophic training; he did not understand what his moral philosophy was in itself pointing to. For that he needed a theological reorientation. Jason Baxter makes the case that Beatrice rebukes Dante 

not so much [for] particular false doctrines [i.e. those learned at the “school” he “followed”], but rather a presumptuous mind-set that could believe that any set of human, rational explanations could effectively communicate all that needs to be known. Indeed, Beatrice suggests that the very darkness of her words was intentionally planned in order that the pilgrim recognize by how much heavenly realities exceed earthly ones, that he recognize how poorly equipped he is to understand opaque celestial truths with earthly rational instruments. (A Beginner’s Guide to Dante’s Divine Comedy 128, emphasis original)

The poet Dante is warning us that to lean on the donna gentile exclusively, without embracing and pursuing the right knowledge of God that governs those truths, is to actually miss her valuable lessons entirely. Again, Vergil can only go so far. Common grace can only bring man back to Eden — it cannot bring him to God. Vergil’s instruction was necessary and helpful (as signposts are), but apart from that all-defining, God-ward orientation, his schoolroom is to no purpose. Thus, the one thing remaining to prepare the pilgrim for true, Heavenly understanding is confession and absolution. This is Beatrice’s first task as Dante’s divinely appointed teacher. She must expose within him his myopic and self-satisfied attitudes. She must reveal to her wayfarer, no matter how harshly, the love that had fallen short. Beatrice herself existed as a means to the ultimate object of mankind’s love — God Himself.  She must disabuse him of his fantasies, and lead Dante into repentance. Which task she performs with swift and surgical precision. He is brought to his knees, and makes full confession that he had sought her beauty as an end in itself instead of as a means to know God more perfectly. And what the poet Dante is teaching us is that true understanding cannot happen apart from a recognition and repentance of our inherited self-centeredness. Vergil, by himself, can bring Dante to a right knowledge of the world God has made; but without faith, without submission, and, as we shall see, without worship, no complete and ultimately true understanding can be achieved. A secular understanding of the world, even if it agrees at some points and in some ways with a biblical one, remains broken. To the extent that it places man at the center of all understanding, and not God, it proves itself misaligned with reality, and therefore becomes a chasing after wind. 

It is here then, at the top of Mount Purgatory, that the donna gentile gives way to Beatrice. Philosophy is always a penultimate pursuit. To refuse to see it as a servant of theology, that all-governing foundation of right memory, understanding, and love, to pit philosophy against theology and make them rivals, preferring the former to the exclusion of the latter, is to embrace secularism. Or rather, it is to substitute a real theology of the real God, with a false theology of a false god, one made in our own image. It is this secular approach that landed the pilgrim in the dark wood, in the middle of his life, when, from a worldly point of view, everything was going well. Before his exile from Florence, he was at the top of his game, in political positions of honor and respect. And yet, it is at this moment in his life, when he is at his most successful and most powerful (politically speaking), that he says he was in a dark wood, having lost the way. This grace-based education was careful to first help Dante unlearn his broken paradigms, shed his broken philosophy, and let go of his broken affections. Only then, after coming to a place of repentance for prioritizing all the wrong things, and shedding all the self-serving inclinations of the will, he is able to stand with Beatrice, ready to rise.

This dual reality (education leading to a fuller understanding of God, and a right understanding of God grounding a real education) can be seen pictured in the twin visions of Paradiso XXVII and XXVIII. At the end of Canto XXVII, having brought Dante to the ninth heaven, and standing on the threshold of the crystalline sphere, Beatrice encourages him to 

“Cast down
your eyes, behold how great an arc you’ve made.”
(Paradiso XXVII.77-78)

He obeys, and turns to see the eight lower spheres circling a distant earth. He is looking down from the height of his journey. His temporal existence has experienced a linear movement from Earth through the heavens, arriving now at the uttermost end of the physical universe. In the following canto, the pilgrim turns from this vision to gaze into the eyes of his love, she who “imparadises” his mind. He then turns to look again, and, looking into the crystalline sphere itself sees another image entirely. Instead of seeing a reflection of the eight lower spheres, with the earth at the center, as we might reasonably guess, Dante sees 

I saw a point that was shining a light
so sharp that the vision on which it burns
must close at its powerful clarity…
(Paradiso XXVIII.16-18) 

As Beatrice explains, he is now beholding the dimensionless One, the One who holds all things, encompasses all things, is before all things. He is seeing God. But instead of seeing Him as the tenth sphere surrounding the other nine, God is revealed as the true center, around which the nine orders of angels, which represent the nine heavens, revolve in reverse order. What is the ninth and final heaven in the spatiotemporal universe, is the first and fastest sphere in the mind of God, moved by a fire of love for Him. 

What does this mean? In these twin visions we see the dual reality of God’s all-encompassing nature, as well as His central and defining Personhood. He is both ultimate meaning and ultimate end, He is center and circumference, He is the first and the last, the Alpha and the Omega. He is both the goal of understanding, and the understanding itself. He is both the end of education, and that which gives education its very ability to shape the hearts of mankind to remember, understand, and love Him by whom we were made. He is the both the road and the destination. Keeping this dual reality at the forefront of our minds is critical to everything we are arguing for. Education by itself can accomplish nothing. Education pointed at the wrong end leads to destruction. For education to function as God intended it to function, and as Dante experiences in the Commedia, it must be grounded in a rightly-ordered philosophy, a rightly-ordered love of true wisdom, which is the fear of the Lord; and at the same time it must be postured toward a growing and increasing understanding and love for Christ, in and through each of the subjects we encounter. In time, we move from Grammar to Moral Philosophy and on into Theology, just as Dante moved from the Moon to the primum mobile and on into the Empyrean. But at the same time, it is the Empyrean which moves and fires and “imparadises” our minds through the ardor and love for God given by a Christ-centered love of wisdom; it is theology, governing a philosophy of education that gives shape to everything we do in the classroom.

Summing it up thus far, the poet opens Paradiso X this way: 

Gazing on His Son with the Love the One
and the Other eternally breathe forth,
the Primal and ineffable Power
with such order made all things wheel round
through mind and space, he who stands in wonder
cannot do so without a taste of Him.
(Paradiso X.1-6) 

It is the Son, and the love He shares with the Father, that gives meaning and coherence to the entire known universe, imbuing the world with sense and understanding. And again, it is not just the mechanics of the world we are led to remember and understand. It is the Person behind it all, revealed in and through it all, that we are brought to love. For if we are honest, whether we are considering the order of the physical world or the abstract world of the mind, in either sphere we “cannot but taste of Him.” He is everywhere present, even if not everywhere acknowledged. This understanding is both the foundation and the goal of education. This is the only understanding that can direct our hearts to truly love Him by whom we were made — in short, to worship Christ. This was the shape of Dante’s own education as he was taken through the schoolroom of the stars.

For those unfamiliar with what Roman Roads has to offer, we have an array of excellent texts and curricula, including

Old Western Culture: a fully integrated, 9-12th grade humanities course, touching on literature, philosophy, history, theology, and more, complete with a 16-volume set of original texts, spanning from Homer and Vergil to Jane Austen and CS Lewis;

Calculus for Everyone: a text that gets to the heart of why Calculus works… and why it is important;

Dante Curriculum: an in-depth, canto-by-canto consideration of one of Christendom’s greatest achievements, Dante’s Divine Comedy, from a solidly Christian perspective;

Fitting Words: a course in the classical art of formal rhetoric, training students to speak powerfully and elegantly;

Picta Dicta: A Latin curriculum in which students learn through all four language pathways (reading, writing, speaking, and hearing), making it both more enjoyable for them to learn and easier to retain. 

Furthermore, we have a growing collection of standalone works, such as Cicero’s On Duties, Dr. Gordon Wilson’s Darwin’s Sandcastle, Elizabeth Landis’ The Forgotten Realm: Civics for American Christians, and Christiana Hale’s Deeper Heaven: A Reader’s Guide to CS Lewis’s Ransom Trilogy, plus several more.