Today is Wednesday, November 27, and this is William Michael of the Classical Liberal Arts Academy. When we talk about the Trivium in classical Catholic education—and when I say classical Catholic education, I mean real classical education, not modern, fake stuff—we’re talking about three subjects that need to be studied in order for us to be able to proceed in the pursuit of wisdom. These are three subjects that must be mastered as the foundation, as the beginning, for the pursuit of wisdom.
They are not three stages of learning, as you’ll see many schools talk about. Many homeschool programs present the three arts of the Trivium as three stages of learning, but that’s just ridiculous homeschool marketing. The Trivium is composed of three arts that need to be mastered for one who is going to pursue classical philosophy, and I’d like to take some time to explain exactly how that works.
This is not a scripted or prewritten talk. I actually make these talks to help myself organize my thoughts for the sake of my teaching in the Academy. So bear with me if I have to backtrack at times, because these are raw thoughts, and I’m sharing them as I think through them myself. I invite you to comment or provide any feedback you’d like if you’re thinking through these things with me or have been thinking about them, as I know some have, who are studying with us in the Academy.
The Trivium, as I said, consists of three arts: grammar, reasoning, and rhetoric. The first thing that we should know is that the art of reasoning—and I could say the art of rhetoric—were both discovered and developed by Aristotle. If we look at the Trivium, we could see that the Trivium really couldn’t have developed as a Trivium until after Aristotle. Aristotle was the discoverer and developer of the art of reasoning, which is the second part of the Trivium. When we look at the ancient library of master texts, we find that Aristotle is also the author of the greatest systematic treatise on the art of rhetoric.
The Trivium really needs to be considered something that is Aristotelian. Grammar, the art of grammar, is really not possible until the art of reasoning and the art of rhetoric are established. So the Trivium is really an Aristotelian thing. It’s something that is provided for us as a fruit of the work of the great philosopher Aristotle.
When we consider these three subjects or arts, we have to ask, what is the goal of these three arts? I would argue that reasoning and rhetoric serve two different ends, and that grammar serves reasoning and rhetoric. We can’t reason without language. We can’t organize our thoughts, which is the purpose of the study of reasoning. We can’t share our thoughts without an accurate method of matching thoughts to words and then creating a shared vocabulary so that our words, which are signs of our ideas, are shared between us. When I say a word to signify an idea, you receive the word, and you can transform that word into its appropriate idea. In this way, we can communicate and share ideas with each other.
We can’t do that unless we have a system for our language. The purpose of the art of grammar is to produce that system. Until the art of reasoning is established, establishing an art of grammar really isn’t possible. As I said, grammar serves reasoning, and it also serves rhetoric. I would argue that when Aristotle discovered and published his teaching of the art of reasoning, that’s really what made the mastery of human language possible. This is where the classical liberal arts really begin to develop—from the reasoning work of Aristotle, which is the foundation of real philosophy.
In the art of reasoning, we study Aristotle’s Organon, and the word Organon means the instrument or the method—the method of philosophizing. Aristotle taught that understanding the art of reasoning was the skill necessary to allow a man to begin to pursue real philosophy. Until one understood the art of reasoning, the pursuit of philosophy was really not possible. This is why Aristotle makes such a distinct mark in the history of philosophy.
When we consider the philosophical treatises of Aristotle and compare them to the inefficient, wandering, and ultimately unproductive dialogues of Plato, or the obscure writings of the Pythagorean philosophers, we can see just how significant Aristotle’s discovery was. When Aristotle discovered the art of reasoning and really established it so clearly that it could be taught, he then took that method, that instrument, as his own and attacked the subjects, the great problems of philosophy, with it. He produced for us all of his scientific treatises: Physics, Metaphysics, Ethics, and so on.
We see not only the method established by Aristotle, but we also see the fruit produced by the use of that method—the proof, as it were, of that method. So we have the Organon, or the instrument that Aristotle has given us, which consists of a number of books: the Categories, On Interpretation, Prior Analytics, Posterior Analytics, Topics, and Sophistical Refutations (or Sophistical Elenchi). These works, taken together, make up the entire system that Aristotle called the Organon, the instrument or the method of philosophy.
In the Classical Liberal Arts Academy, in the pursuit of real classical Catholic education, we must study to master the content of Aristotle’s Organon. We do this in the Academy in our Classical Reasoning courses. We study through all the works of Aristotle on the art of reasoning, and we’ve got assessments on those works. Every chapter of every book of the Organon can be studied and assessed, which is quite a remarkable achievement. I cannot really take credit for it because, without the technology that’s developed in this generation, really in the last ten years, it wouldn’t have been possible. It’s my willingness to do the work coupled with the providential development of information technology that has made this work incredibly simple.
As we go through the Organon in reasoning, we learn that the goal of philosophy, at least the goal of rational philosophy, is to order the mind—to order the ideas of the mind. If you ask, “Order them according to what? Order them how?” the answer is to order them as God’s mind is ordered—to try to think about the world, think about God, and think about ourselves as God does.
The fascinating pursuit in rational philosophy is asking the question, “How are God’s thoughts ordered?” Of course, we can’t know that in any absolute sense. The Scriptures teach us that God Himself says to us, “As the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my thoughts higher than your thoughts.” He tells us, and St. Paul, I think it is, says in the New Testament, “How unsearchable are God’s judgments, and how inscrutable His ways!” While we can’t actually possess the mind of God, we can have a mind that is ordered like God’s mind, which fulfills our duty to be imitators of God. We can look at the world and one another and think about them as God Himself thinks about them, achieving a kind of harmony with the divine mind. This is the goal of reasoning: to order our thoughts so that our minds become in harmony with God’s mind.
We begin Aristotle’s Organon by asking, “How are the ideas that we have to be ordered?” Aristotle explains in the Categories that there are many different ideas and that they have relations to one another. Some stand alone as names of individual things, like “Socrates.” Some are used as the names of classes of things, like “man.” Some are used as the names of greater classes of things, like “animal.” This hierarchy continues until we finally come to the name for the class that contains all the classes. Aristotle argued that there are ten such classes, and these are called the categories—the most general genera, to use Aristotle’s language.
These ten categories provide, as it were, the ten ultimate subjects of philosophical investigation—the ten subjects of wisdom, the ten streams that should order the mind. If you’re familiar with Aristotle’s Categories, you should be able to name them. It’s okay if you don’t get them all in the right order, but you should get the first few in order since there’s a distinction between them and the others. The first is substance, the second is quantity, the third is quality, and the fourth is relation. Then come place (where), time (when), situation, habitude (or having), action, and passion. I think I’ve named all ten of them. Again, that’s off the top of my head, so if that’s only nine, I’m sorry. But Aristotle identifies these ten categories, these ten highest genera of ideas, and argues that all ideas, all things, can be arranged under these ten most general genera.
By starting with the Categories, we begin, as it were, to organize this file cabinet or directory of ideas. We start, as I said, with substances—that’s the first category. Then quantity is the second category, and then we go into quality and the others. That system of ideas—the catalog of ideas, as it were, the hierarchy of ideas—is explained by Aristotle, and you can see how incredibly brilliant he was. This system is explained in the book titled Categories.
The names of ideas discussed in the Categories are simple ideas. They are ideas that stand alone in the mind. There’s no truth or falsehood in them; they’re simply names—names for ideas. But things get more interesting when these ideas are joined together. When these ideas are joined together, something happens: truth and falsehood are produced in the mind. This joining together of thoughts, where truth and falsehood are produced, is what Aristotle calls “interpretation” or “enunciation”—the statement of propositions, or judgments.
For example, if I say, “Socrates is man,” and with that verb “is” I join those two ideas together in a proposition—”Socrates is man”—I no longer have these individual ideas floating around. I have something that’s much more interesting: I have an assertion that is either in agreement with reality or contradicts reality. It’s either true or it’s false. The joining together of ideas in enunciative speech is what’s studied in detail in the second book of the Organon: On Interpretation.
We start with simple ideas in the Categories and learn how to organize those simple ideas. Then we study the more complex compound ideas in On Interpretation. Once we have propositions floating around in our minds, something even more interesting happens when these propositions start interacting with one another. By joining two propositions together, we can reveal a relationship that leads to a third proposition—one which was previously unknown but is actually created or begotten of those first two propositions.
When this happens—when this happens truly, I should say—so that a third proposition necessarily arises from two other propositions, this, Aristotle says, is reasoning. This is reasoning, and this is the instrument of philosophy. This is how human beings discover truth.
We discover true things—that is, we find unknown truths—by joining together truths that already exist in the mind. Our minds, by this faculty of reasoning, are capable of producing or discovering truth, and that really is quite amazing. Our minds are truth machines. We don’t need to go and see things to make true conclusions about them. We can have partial knowledge of things, and by connecting that partial knowledge in certain ways, we can come to perfect knowledge. This work of pursuing perfect knowledge by joining together bits of imperfect knowledge is what reasoning does. This is the method of philosophy.
The doctrine of the method of reasoning, or the syllogism, is the system of three statements where the third statement is necessarily produced by the truth of the first two statements. This is Aristotle’s great discovery. His ability to not only understand what exactly is going on when that takes place but also articulate it in a systematic way is what makes an art of it, which tames it, as it were. Aristotle tamed the mind—or the natural faculty of reason—in a similar way as Alexander tamed his famous horse. Aristotle is essentially the tamer of the human mind, the tamer of the rational soul. He discovered the method of seeking wisdom, the method of philosophizing, and this is all published, as I said, in his set of treatises on the art of reasoning.
Aristotle identified two different kinds of reasoning, and that’s why we have a number of different books in the Organon. We have Posterior Analytics and we have the Topics because Aristotle explained that sometimes the ideas we join together—the propositions we join together—are self-evident, true statements. What’s significant about joining together true statements, or beginning with true statements—and by true, he means absolutely certain, self-evident truths or axioms—is that when the faculty of reason is exercised on true premises, the conclusions are also absolutely certain. He argued that this kind of reasoning, where we reason from truths, from true premises, and draw true conclusions that are absolutely certain, is scientific reasoning. This is the kind of reasoning that produces philosophical science.
However, there are many different problems and questions where we cannot begin with premises that are known for certain to be true. Instead, we begin with statements that are probable—likely true but not necessarily certain. Aristotle explained that when we reason from premises that are probable but not certainly true, this is a different kind of reasoning, and he called that dialectical reasoning. It’s not sufficient for the formation of philosophical sciences, but it’s very useful, and we’ll get into its uses in a bit. You can’t use dialectical reasoning to establish positive philosophical sciences. That was the flaw with the Socratic method. That’s the flaw with Platonic philosophy.
Plato can beat people up who get things wrong. Socrates can spin people into confusion who think they know the truth but don’t. What Socrates and Plato can’t do is write a systematic treatise like Aristotle can because they didn’t understand demonstrative reasoning. In dialectical reasoning, Aristotle basically systematizes what was practiced by Socrates and Plato as the dialectical method, and this is taught in Aristotle’s work, The Topics.
All of this has to do with good and true reasoning in philosophy. Aristotle was also aware that there were men in society who were capable of deceiving people with arguments that, on the surface, appeared to be true and conclusive. These men were called Sophists. Aristotle was puzzled by the ability of these men to deceive people with what he calls apparent syllogisms—arguments that appear to be syllogisms but really aren’t.
In order to demonstrate and destroy the false arguments of the Sophists, Aristotle first had to establish the true science and art of reasoning and then use it to take apart these confusing and deceiving arguments. He does this in his work Sophistical Refutations. You can see that in the art of reasoning, Aristotle really provided us with everything we need to go into the world seeking wisdom: seeking to establish a quality of knowledge that’s true and scientific, while also being able to address problems and questions where what is probable is good enough. As we learn in moral philosophy, wise men live according to probability. Aristotle also allows us to refute the deceiving, confusing arguments of the Sophists.
This entire system of truth-seeking through philosophy was established and taught by Aristotle. It cannot be overstated how much we owe to Aristotle and what a remarkable figure he is in human history. He establishes the method of philosophizing, and then we see him apply that method in the production of his scientific treatises, which we study in classical philosophy.
It’s pretty clear, I think, why we need to study the second art of the Trivium, the art of reasoning. That’s pretty clear. If I were to say there is a central focus of classical education, it’s this: becoming masters of the art of reasoning. That’s really the focal point of classical education because the applications of that skill are infinite. It’s valuable to everyone.
We have the art of reasoning, and to study it is very simple. We need to study Aristotle’s Organon. As I said, we do that in the Classical Liberal Arts Academy’s classical reasoning courses. We study every single chapter of Aristotle’s works on the art of reasoning.
With all of that established, Aristotle, like Socrates earlier, showed how important language was. As the ideas were able to be organized according to Aristotle’s method, language—which consists of the spoken signs that represent those ideas—could also be organized. When we look at the organization of human language, we find that just as the mind consists of simple ideas, propositions, and syllogisms, language is organized in a similar way, almost in a mirror image of the mind. After all, all of our language is simply spoken symbols of our ideas.
The art of grammar then developed really as a three-part system. In grammar, we have etymology as the first major part, which is the study of the parts of speech—that is, the individual words by themselves that are used to form speech. Then we have the second part of grammar, which is syntax, where we begin to join words together to form sentences. We also learn about different kinds of sentences that can be produced, not just enunciative speech, but also other kinds of speech like prayers, wishes, or commands. We learn there are a number of different modes of speech that are possible when ideas are joined in different ways with different intentions.
Lastly, prosody is the third major part of grammar, which deals with the use of language to accomplish different effects—poetic meter, pronunciation, and so on. We find in grammar something of a mirror of the art of reasoning.
When we look at the parts of speech in etymology, for students who don’t study the Trivium, all of this information looks pretty random. What’s really dangerous when these subjects are not studied in their proper place in a philosophical curriculum is that the people teaching these subjects, who don’t know what these things are actually for, feel they have the freedom to just make up their own explanations. This is why, when you turn to modern textbooks—or just any textbooks—if you’re not absolutely certain that the author of the grammar book is running everything he or she says about grammar through the art of reasoning or the art of rhetoric (which I’ll talk about in a minute), then the study of grammar becomes something that’s totally random and subjective.
If you’ve ever been in a high school writing class where you’re graded on your writing and feel like there’s no way to know what’s right or wrong, and the grading seems random, you hand your essay in to the teacher, and it’s like a mystery machine that returns your paper with a number on it that you have no idea what it represents. That’s the effect of teaching—or pretending to teach—grammar and writing composition without any reference to the actual art of reasoning or the art of rhetoric.
When we look at the art of grammar through the lens of the art of reasoning—or I should say, when we look at the art of grammar as it helps us to master the art of reasoning, because the two can’t be separated—everything in grammar begins to make sense. We can see why it matters to follow the rules for sentence-making, because we’re trying to make propositions clear. If we’re not stating something in an enunciative way where there’s truth or falsehood, we want to make sure we show that in our language.
If I want to say not that it is raining outside, I don’t want to make that assertion or claim that it is true. I simply want to say that it may be raining outside. I can change the mode of my speaking and signal to another person exactly what I mean. I’m not saying that it is raining outside; I’m saying that it may be raining. You can see how we learn to speak with greater subtlety to communicate increasingly complex ideas, which is necessary for life.
We can see how the art of grammar is a counterpart to the art of reasoning.
This brings us to rhetoric. We may say, “Well, I can understand why the art of reasoning is so important, because, after all, it’s the method of philosophy. I can use a knowledge of the art of reasoning to investigate philosophical problems and questions and find solutions or just explore, starting with what I know and seeing where it leads me by joining propositions together and seeing where the combinations take us.” That’s true, and that’s fascinating. That’s what motivates the contemplative life—that sense of wonder and interest in discovering truth and solving problems by means of reasoning.
But the benefit of that contemplative life is ultimately individual. It benefits me. I may be filled with truth. I may, through contemplation, come to know the truth, and that’s very good. But as Aristotle explains later in his Ethics, that’s not the best thing I can do. There’s something I can do that’s better than learning the truth. As crazy as that may sound, there’s something even better than contemplation.
It’s good for me to know the truth, but it’s even better for me to lead my neighbors to know the truth. Because I’m not an individual, but I was created to be a social animal, and because I am my brother’s keeper, and I am responsible to teach, correct, and exhort my neighbors, my children, and so on, I also need to understand the art by which I might do so. How do I not only contemplate but share the fruits of my contemplation? How do I not only discover the truth for myself but help my neighbor to come to the knowledge of the truth with me?
In order to do this, I need to learn about what it is that causes human beings to make judgments and decisions as they do. I need to study and learn to understand the human will. What we learn is that reasoning alone, as important as it is—and for a perfect man who follows reason, all he needs is the art of reasoning—is not enough to lead others to the truth. They’re often influenced and persuaded by other factors, such as belief, trust, desire, emotion, and so on.
Because I want to make a sincere effort to help my neighbor, who is weaker than me (which is why I need to help him), I also need to understand how to communicate in a way that’s fitting to actually be helpful to my neighbor. I need to bring about this greater good of leading many, especially those who are not perfect, to the truth, to embrace and receive the truth, and to live according to the truth so that they may actually pursue happiness and be happy.
In order to do this work, this next part of the life of a good and wise man, I’ve got to learn how to communicate with my neighbor.
Some people think of the art of rhetoric and they corrupt it, oversimplify it, and misrepresent it. They call it the art of persuasion, as if it’s some sort of set of lessons on how to make people vote for you, buy your product, or join your group. This idea of persuasion—that’s not what rhetoric is. True rhetoric respects free will. The true art of rhetoric respects human freedom, just as God respects human freedom. It’s not about tricking people. It’s not about deceiving people for the sake of bringing about some apparent good. The end does not justify the means, because human freedom must always be respected.
The true purpose of rhetoric, as Aristotle explains, is to know all of the available means of persuasion. The purpose of rhetoric is to understand what all of the available means of persuasion are, because the mixture of what may help another person differs from one person to the next. Aristotle gives us a very helpful comparison between a rhetorician and a physician.
What he says is this: A physician doesn’t have the power to make someone healthy. That’s not the physician’s job. If the physician fails to heal a sick man, we don’t throw him in prison or shut down his office or take away his medical license. What we seek from a true physician—not some quack physician who’s just making money prescribing medications to cover symptoms, but a true physician—is a man who has studied the causes of sicknesses and understands the various possible causes or combinations of causes of different sicknesses that may arise.
What makes the physician valuable is not that he sees a sick patient and says, “Oh yeah, that’s ABC. Take two of these every day and you’ll be fine.” That’s not what a true physician does, because human health and the body are more complicated than that. We can’t even prescribe the same diet to all human beings, let alone medications or remedies. What the true physician has to know is what all of the possible causes of a condition could be. It could be complicated, involving a number of intermingling causes. He’s got to know what all of the possible remedies can be, because one remedy might be effective in one person and ineffective in another. We all experience this.
A great physician is one who understands that and comes to his patient with a knowledge of all of the possible causes of a condition and a full panoply, as it were, of remedies that are possible. He can then work systematically through the causes and the remedies until something is found that is effective. That’s the real work of the physician.
At the same time, a physician may find the cause—the true cause of the problem—and may also know and prescribe the true remedy, but find that the patient refuses to cooperate. Not only is the right diagnosis necessary, and not only is the right remedy necessary, but the collaboration of the patient is also necessary, and that’s not in the physician’s power.
Aristotle compares the work of a rhetorician, who is sort of a physician seeking to remove falsehoods or diseases of the soul and prescribe remedies in knowledge of the truth, with the work of a physician who is working to promote health in the body.
On a personal note, I’ve mentioned in talks before that when I went to college, I was a pre-med student. I was doing well as a pre-med student, working in a chemistry lab. I was a dean’s list pre-med student at Rutgers and enjoying myself. But I was also growing as a Christian, and the thought came to me when I was about 20 years old that if I pursued life as a physician, I could do good. I could help heal people’s bodies. I could help people physically.
But as I grew as a Christian, I began to realize that if I pursued Christian ministry—and at the time, I was a Protestant—or if I worked in education, I could actually be a physician of the soul. That’s far more significant. That thought, as immature and ignorant as I was at that time in my life, was clear enough to help me realize that working to remedy the soul is a greater work than working to remedy the ills of the body. That’s actually what led me into classical studies and what led me to abandon my plans for medical studies.
We see that interesting comparison in Aristotle’s Rhetoric, which sort of explains exactly what I was thinking, even though I thought it by God’s grace when I was 20 years old and ignorant of all these things at the time.
This is the purpose of the art of rhetoric. As I said, while the art of reasoning would suffice if we lived as isolated individuals—reasoning would be all that we needed, and we might not even need speech or grammar—because we were created to live as social animals and because we are morally accountable for our neighbors, not for making them believe and practice the truth, but for warning them of their errors and presenting them with the truth, we must do so according to the Golden Rule. This means we must do so in a way that’s patient and respectful of their freedom. The art of rhetoric becomes necessary.
This is explained again in Aristotle’s Ethics, where he teaches that the real highest end of the human life is not to seek happiness for oneself, which is good, but not the best end. The best end is to seek to bring one’s neighbors to happiness as well. Aristotle called that work political science. He referred to that work of leading others to happiness as political science, which is pretty interesting to think about. That’s the true end of true political science.
We think about these things: the value and necessity of contemplation to seek and obtain the virtue of the soul, which is truth. We seek to contemplate by learning to exercise the faculty of reasoning in a masterful way, in a scientific way. We learn that through the art of reasoning. To do that, we’ve got to have language that is subtle enough and scientific enough to serve the contemplative life. This is the purpose of the art of grammar: to provide our minds with the language that allows them to do what they need to do.
Because we have a responsibility not only to seek happiness for ourselves but for our neighbors as well—which is the end Aristotle calls political science—we need to study the art of rhetoric. These three arts then become the arts of classical education, at least part of it. These are the three arts known as the Trivium: grammar, reasoning, and rhetoric. That’s the true nature of the Trivium and the true purpose of the three subjects of the Trivium.
When you think about these things, if someone were to say, “Do I really need a classical education?” the answer is yes, you really do. As a human being, if you’re going to be educated, you really do need a classical education. But just because an education is called classical doesn’t mean that it actually is directed to serve the end of real classical education.
The fake classical education movement is dangerous because the people working in it are doing what the Sophists were doing in the ancient world. They are the enemies of real education. They are even more dangerous than modern educators. Modern educators can be honest and say, “Look, we’re just seeking to help you become good citizens, to understand how to live in a democratic society. We’re seeking to help you prepare for the marketplace. The purpose of our modern education is practical.” That’s actually good and useful for many people.
What’s dangerous about the pretenders who label themselves as classical educators is that they tell people they possess something that they don’t actually possess. That’s exactly how a Sophist is described in Aristotle’s reasoning. A Sophist, Aristotle says, is a person who pretends to be wise for the sake of money. That’s what the people involved in the fake classical education culture are doing. They’re pretending to offer what the wise men of history offered, making it available to students in exchange for tuition, but in fact, they’re doing no such thing. It’s really terrible, but God always allows these things to sift the wheat, as it were.
In real classical education, the subjects we study, all the way down to grammar, reasoning, and rhetoric, directly relate to our duties in the Christian life. That’s really important to understand. When we get education right, the studies we undertake directly serve our duties as Christians. It’s not some weird, abstract thing. It’s not some literature club for bookworms who like to sit around and talk. It directly relates to our chief end, which is to be sanctified, to love our neighbor, and to seek eternal life.
The arts of grammar, reasoning, and rhetoric—the Trivium—when rightly understood, are arts that are essential to the Christian life. That’s why, throughout history, wherever there was Christian education, there was the Trivium—not the fake nonsense in modern Christian schools, not the Dorothy Sayers nonsense about three stages of learning, or any of this absurd modern material, but the real arts of language, reasoning, and communication serving man’s ultimate end.
To show you how directly this correlates to the Christian life, you probably know that I’m a lay Dominican, a member of the Order of Saint Dominic. One of the mottos or expressions of the mission of the Dominican Order is: “To contemplate and share the fruits of that contemplation.” To contemplate and share the fruits of that contemplation. That mission is directly served by the study of the Trivium.
That mission is directly served. I study the arts of grammar and reasoning so that I can contemplate. I study the arts of grammar, reasoning, and rhetoric so that I can share the fruits of that contemplation. When rightly understood, classical education directly serves the needs of the Christian life. That’s why a counterfeit version of classical education is so dangerous. It doesn’t actually serve the end of the Christian life. It distracts us from the end of the Christian life.
If we would just follow the teaching and example of the wise men and saints in history, we would learn exactly what they did, and we would be able to do it ourselves. This is what I’ve sought to do in the Classical Liberal Arts Academy: simply to research the history of the education of saints and wise men, to restore it, and to make it available—not for you, but for me. I did it for my own sake. Now that it’s been developed, we’re able to share the fruits of that contemplation, which we do in the Academy.
I’d like to invite you not only to study it with me but to introduce your children to it and hopefully avoid the distraction of the dead end of fake classical education, which is a real danger today because of the deception it sets before Christian people. What’s worst of all is this: One of the great criticisms of Christians in the present generation is that Christians are ignorant. They’re ignorant and arrogant—this amazing combination of ignorance and arrogance.
The reason this happens among Christians is because Christians tell themselves they’re doing God’s will. They tell themselves they’re studying the truth, that they’re learning what the saints learned, when in fact, they’re not. They think they’re learning something, possessing something, or knowing something that they actually don’t. They walk around with this attitude, this arrogant attitude, as if they’re something they’re not. This is one of the greatest obstacles today for evangelization—the general lack of trust and respect for Christian people by non-Christians.
Many Christians aren’t intelligent. If you go back and look at the lives of the apostles and the Church Fathers, the first evangelists of the Church, they always respected the wisdom and learning of unbelievers. Modern Christians don’t. Modern Christians act like everyone is stupid and that they’re the only ones who know anything, but they don’t really know the things they think they know or the things they should know.
This is the goal of real classical education. I’d like to wrap up there as we approach an hour. Maybe tomorrow or in an upcoming talk, I’ll discuss the Quadrivium in the same way and explain how the four arts of classical mathematics relate to the pursuit of true wisdom through philosophy and how they relate to the Christian life. Look forward to that, and I hope you found this helpful. God bless you.
