The Trivium: Pagan vs. Christian
In my article on the incompatible, oxymoronic concept called "the classical Christian curriculum," I made it clear that you cannot combine classical paganism and Christianity.
I pointed out that all of the versions of this oxymoronic curriculum are based on a watered-down, expurgated, G-rated version of classical culture. //www.garynorth.com/public/12665.cfm. It's fake.
Almost immediately, I received this response: it is possible to use the medieval trivium but not bring classical paganism. No, it isn't. What is palmed off as trivium-based education today is classical paganism to the core. It always has been. It is the same oxymoronic strategy.
SAYERS HAD IT WRONG: LATIN
I have been aware of this strategy for a long time. I first read Dorothy Sayers' 1947 article, "The Lost Tools of Learning," in 1961. It was sent out as an insert in National Review. I was impressed by this aspect of the article: she argued that the medieval trivium of grammar, logic, and rhetoric paralleled the mental development of children. This was the heart of her insight. I think it was a legitimate insight.
Then she went on to make a sales pitch for teaching Latin. (Note: she never told her readers that she was an advertising expert. She made her living in advertising. She became famous with her murder mysteries.) The moment somebody tells you that your child needs to learn Latin, you are being conned into the acceptance of the oxymoronic curriculum.
There are academically legitimate uses for a systematic knowledge of Latin. These uses are related to the study of untranslated documents: Latin Christian fathers and Renaissance humanists. If you want your child to become an unemployable specialist, whose only hope of employment is in a major university -- a job he will never get -- it is a good idea to learn Latin. It is important for a few specialists to understand the development of Renaissance thought (pre-1600). Academic education was in Latin, because it was international in scope. But this is not the sales pitch for these trivium-based programs: "Give your child a head start in understanding Renaissance thought." I am not opposed to this. As an avocation, it's a good idea -- as long as the student is coming to the topic as a critic, not as a cheerleader. But this is not how Latin is being peddled to naive homeschool mothers.
We are never told any of this by promoters of the medieval trivium as the basis of a Christian curriculum. We never read about the importance of learning the medieval Church fathers, and the importance of doing this translation as part of the educational project. We are never told about the importance of learning about late medieval and Renaissance scholarship, as taught by the universities. Always, we are told that it is important to learn Latin in order to understand the fundamentals of language. This is utter poppycock. If you want to understand languages, you should concentrate on an intense study of the spoken version of the language, as any child would do, and then move to the simple literature of that culture. Anyone who tells you that you have to learn Latin in order to better understand modern European languages is telling you to waste a lot of your child's time. If you want to understand a modern European language, study the language, but don't waste time on Latin.
This focus on Latin is part of a holdover of Victorian upper class social positioning. This was in turn a holdover of the history of Oxford and Cambridge, or maybe Harvard in the early years. A person was able to distinguish himself from the common classes of people because he had learned a little Latin when he was in preparatory school and at Harvard or one of the two major English universities. This screening was almost entirely social. It was only barely intellectual. It was a way of putting yourself in a higher social class, from which the recruiting for the European bureaucracies would take place.
This social climbing based on a rudimentary understanding of Latin ended in the United States in the 1870's, when almost nobody read Latin anyway. Social climbers liked to pretend that they did read Latin after they went off to college. In the 1870's, Charles Elliott, the president of Harvard, introduced the elective system, in a systematic attempt to abandon the old Latin-based curriculum. This was one of the best moves that Elliott ever made. This was his great legacy to modern education. It was on target, and it should have been done 200 years earlier.
Let's talk about the trivium. Dorothy Sayers made a major error, based on her lack of Christian education. She assumed that the medieval trivium was the heart of medieval understanding. But the heart of medieval understanding was Christian understanding, and this breakthrough took place in the second century. It was, from the beginning, a confused mixture of Greek philosophy, Latin education, and the Bible. From the very beginning, Christian philosophers tried to justify Christianity by bringing in Platonic categories. This tradition faded in the Dark Ages, which was one of the brighter aspects of the Dark Ages. After Aristotle was reintroduced to the West, beginning in the 11th century, a Latin-based version of Greek learning returned by way of the newly invented university. Aristotle was certainly a tremendous improvement over the communist and mystic, Plato.
Sayers had Aquinas in mind, not Plato.
For a corrective to Sayers, see William Blake's article on the proper use of the trivium, published in 1977. I was the editor. I persuaded him to write it.
GRAMMAR, LOGIC, AND RHETORIC: HERMENEUTICS
The medieval categories of grammar, logic, and rhetoric were simply the remnants of a Greek interpretation of these categories. But these categories are basic to all literature. There is nothing uniquely classical about grammar, logic, and rhetoric. Every society has all three. It is impossible to think apart from all three.
With respect to the interpretation of the Bible, there are three categories, and all three have been emphasized in the history of biblical interpretation. They are: the grammatical/historical, the theological, and the symbolic. These are the biblical categories that we know through Dorothy Sayers regarding the trivium: grammar, logic, and rhetoric.
Sayers wanted people to read Latin. She did not recommend the Christian approach to the trivium, namely, early education in Hebrew and Koine Greek, meaning New Testament. She was fixated on medievalism. Her whole outlook was shaped by her loose understanding of late-medieval thought, as interpreted by Aquinas. She had little understanding of the Bible and less understanding of the principles of biblical interpretation, which are classified under the concept of hermeneutics.
If somebody promotes a curriculum based on the trivium, you had better find out which version of the trivium. If the curriculum recommends Latin, you are getting warmed-over humanism. You're getting baptized humanism. You're getting G-rated humanism.
I have yet to see a commercial curriculum that promotes the trivium, and then recommends a study of Hebrew and Koine Greek, beginning in the first grade and second grade. I have seen one such curriculum, and it was taught to my children three decades ago, but it was only taught in one school, and that was because I was one of the advisers to that school. It was never made into a commercial curriculum. Our children learned Koine Greek, beginning in the second grade, as I remember. It did not stick, because unless you follow through on these studies on a permanent basis, they don't stick. None of these curriculum programs stick with Latin, either. This is a good thing.
Latin is a matter of bragging rights. It is a matter of marketing. It is a matter of invoking Victorian humanism in the name of Christianity. It sells, but it sells only to Christian parents who have rotten educations, who know nothing about Victorian humanism, and who are convinced that they ought to pay high prices to get a curriculum that is based on something other than the Bible. Yet it is sold in the name of Christianity.
As you can imagine, I regard this as one more example of poorly educated people teaching poorly educated people how to give their children theologically schizophrenic educations.
If you want to teach the trivium, use the King James Bible. Show how in church history, certain passages have been exposited in terms of one of these three categories: grammatical/historical, theological, or symbolic. Teach the history of Christian hermeneutics, not the history of pagan Latin classics, most notably the militarist and power-seeking Julius Caesar. He came, he saw, and he conquered . . . republican Rome. He crossed the Rubicon, violating Roman law, and that was the end of the republic.
CONCLUSION
If you want to buy a pagan curriculum for your children, go with some version of the Latin trivium in translation. Don't waste your children's time on translating Roman Latin works. Students can read the Latin classics in English.
If you want a Christian curriculum, teach Koine Greek, not Latin, unless you are training up a true historian, who will devote his time to untranslated Church fathers or Renaissance humanists. Or just use the King James Bible. The language is magisterial.