The Epicurean doctrine of the soul stands as a direct challenge to classical Christian education, as it provides the most comprehensive philosophical ancestor to modern materialism. We might almost see the entire secular modern zeitgeist, so entrenched in the western world, as merely the long shadow of Epicureanism. This fact alone gives the lie to modernism’s grandiose claims of progress, enlightenment and deliverance from medieval superstition. Little do its adherents realize that they have unwittingly adopted the views of one ancient Greek philosopher against the others! 

How true it is what the writer of Ecclesiastes said, that there is nothing new under the sun, a statement that applies more often than we might think in the realm of ideas. As a side note, this fact provides a potent rationale for introducing our students to the Great Conversation in our classical Christian education model.

Epicurus (c. 341–270 BC) follows right after Aristotle as the founder of a new school called “The Garden,”the counter to his contemporary Zeno of Citium, the originator of Stoicism. The vast majority of Epicurus’ writings have been lost to us, with the exception of a few letters by Diogenes Laërtius, a list of maxims, and some scraps preserved in the arguments of later writers. He taught that the highest good is ataraxia (tranquility, or freedom from fear) and aponia (absence of pain), and he aimed to deliver his followers from the superstitious fear of death and the gods through his claims of a materialistic and atomistic universe.

The Roman Epicurean poet Lucretius (c. 99 – 55 BC) provides the fullest exposition of Epicurean thought through his 6 book didactic poem De Rerum Natura (“On the Nature of Things”). In it a pseudo-scientific vision of the universe as made up entirely of atoms is used to unravel the “superstition” of traditional religions, as well as the immortality of the soul. As could be imagined, the implications of his views for morality are immense. While he ends book 4 with a diatribe against romantic love and sexual desire as a source of immense suffering and madness, and a distraction from rational philosophical pursuits, it is hard to remove him from the charge of nihilistic amoralism, or at least unfettered hedonism. There is a reason the biblical quotation, “Let us eat and drink, for tomorrow we die,” becomes associated with Epicureanism (see Isaiah 22:13; Proverbs 23:35; Luke 12:19; 1 Corinthians 15:32).

While we must ultimately reject its conclusions regarding morality and mortality, we will, following the ghost of these ideas into the courtyard, glean valuable warnings as well as helpful insights regarding the educational impact of our fundamental beliefs and the intimate connection between the soul, the body, and the process of learning.

The Material and Corporeal Soul

The Epicurean soul is defined by its substance: it is material and corporeal. This atomistic view directly opposes Aristotle’s hylomorphism, discussed in the last article, which held the soul to be the form or the “first grade of actuality” of a natural body. In contrast, the substance or essence of the soul, for Epicurus, is not form but fine particles. In his De Anima, Aristotle had spent a whole section demolishing the atomic view of the soul propounded by Democritus long before. Epicurus revived this view of the mind or soul as minute particles spread throughout the body 

Epicurus maintained a strictly materialist (atomic) view of the soul, the gods and the eternal universe as a whole and so might be the first progenitor of the leading myth of modern secularism. The mind (animus) and the soul (anima) are a corporeal aggregate of atoms. Lucretius specifies that the soul is formed of “very minute, fine, and tiny particles” (p. 112) This corporeal nature dictates the soul’s function during life, defining the relationship between the body and mind:

“Now I say that mind and soul are held in union one with the other, and form of themselves a single nature, but that the head, as it were, and lord in the whole body is the reason, which we call mind or understanding, and it is firmly seated in the middle region of the breast…. The rest of the soul, spread abroad throughout the body, obeys and is moved at the will and inclination of the understanding” (Lucretius, De Rerum Natura III., p. 110).

According to Lucretius, the soul is intimately united with the body, being inextricably “linked on throughout veins, flesh, sinews, and bones” (p. 211). It’s hard not to be somewhat impressed by this stunning anticipation of the nervous system, even while we object to the ultimate conclusions of his philosophy.

The Soul as Biological Mechanism

Though the Epicurean view of the soul fails to account for the transcendent or divine aspect of the human person (the imago Dei), its emphasis on the materiality of the mind offers a surprising parallel to the modern discoveries of neuroscience and the physical substrata of cognition and sensation. It’s important to give the devil his due. Of course, we now locate the seat of the mind in the head rather than the chest–a view argued for later on by Galen, the 2nd century AD physician and philosopher, but the physical similarities of a central nervous system command center (animus – mind) and neural networks of a similar nature distributed throughout the body (anima – soul) are not inconsequential.

As the source of motion, the mind must be nimble because, as he explains, “Nothing is seen to come to pass so swiftly as what the mind pictures to itself coming to pass and starts to do itself.” This nimble nature means the mind “is very fine in texture, and is made and formed of very tiny particles”(pp. 112-113). Moreover, the mind is seen to act physically upon the body:

“This same reasoning shows that the nature of mind and soul is bodily. For when it is seen to push on the limbs, to pluck the body from sleep, to change the countenance, and to guide and turn the whole man—none of which things we see can come to pass without touch, nor touch in its turn without body—must we not allow that mind and soul are formed of bodily nature?” (Lucretius, De Rerum Natura III., p. 111).

This description of the Mind (Animus) acting as the “monarch of life” (p. 119) that instantly initiates motion throughout the limbs highlights the importance of the physical mechanism of the body (what we now term the nervous system) in sensation and thought. The Epicureans, forced by their materialism to account for all consciousness through physics, explain that mental activity requires a delicate, highly mobile, and well-functioning corporeal nature. The fact that the mind is “distressed by the blow of bodily weapons” reinforces the inseparable bond between body and thought (p. 112).

Even without the benefit of magnetic resonance imaging, we can imagine how the experience of sensation itself might lead an ancient person to this conclusion. There must be some substance connecting my thoughts and will to my limbs. By comparison, Plato’s entirely non-material soul seems a bit farfetched and shadowy, while Aristotle’s hylomorphic soul might feel overly academic, with its complex distinction between form and substance. In a way it’s not surprising that the atomic conception of the soul survived Aristotle’s dismantling into the less philosophical Hellenistic era.

Mortality and the Pragmatic Pursuit of Tranquility

Epicureanism’s insistence on a proto-scientific and thoroughly materialistic account of the human soul serves a primarily pragmatic picture of death. The mind stuff simply disintegrates when the physical bonds holding it together are severed at death. Consciousness, an emergent phenomenon of life, which itself arose on its own, evolution-like, from an eternal, infinite universe full of swirling atoms, will simply cease with death.

The Epicurean position is absolute mortality. Since the mind and soul are material, they are subject to death and dissolution, contradicting the Aristotelean assertion that the rational soul or mind (nous) is “separable, impassible, unmixed and alone is immortal and eternal” (Aristotle, On the Soul, III. 5; p. 179). Lucretius argues that since the mind “can be changed by medicine,” it “has a mortal life” (p. 123).

An early adopter of the conservation of matter, Lucretius claims that the soul is “dissolved” into its constituent atoms upon death:

“Now therefore, since, when vessels are shattered, you behold the water flowing away on every side, and the liquid parting this way and that, and since cloud and smoke part asunder into air, you must believe that the soul too is scattered and passes away far more swiftly, and is dissolved more quickly into its first-bodies, when once it is withdrawn from a man’s limbs, and has departed.” (Lucretius, De Rerum Natura III., p. 209)

This doctrine aims to banish the “old fear of Acheron” and the “close bondage of religion” by confirming that death is nothing to us (p. 107).

Although there may be gods or a God, they are uninterested in us, and there is no afterlife, no Hades, and no eternal punishment. The fate of the atomic soul, therefore, establishes the profound ethical difference between Epicureanism and its philosophical predecessors, not to mention Christian theology. Right and wrong are not enforced by an impartial law of justice; there is no transcendence or final righting of wrongs, but only a hedonistic justification for virtue rather than vice as the most beneficial path. Yet, the Epicurean dedication to mental peace (ataraxia) does reveal a pragmatic insight that is nevertheless valuable to educators.

The Value of Physical and Mental Tranquility for Study

The Epicurean goal is pleasure (hedone), defined as the “absence of pain in the body and of trouble in the soul” (Epicurus, Letter to Menoeceus). While pleasure here is an end in itself, the means by which Epicureans achieve this—the dedication to study (for him primarily natural science)—does not devolve into all-out moral dissolution. This vision of ataraxia (tranquility) for the sake of pleasurable contemplation offers a positive pedagogical mandate: cultivating tranquility is necessary for serious intellectual work.

Lucretius urges his student, Memmius, to approach philosophy correctly:

“For the rest, do thou (Memmius), lend empty ears and a keen mind, severed from cares, to true philosophy, lest, before they are understood, you should leave aside in disdain my gifts set forth for you with unflagging zeal” (Lucretius, De Rerum Natura I., p. 62).

The acquisition of knowledge is explicitly linked to the maintenance of pleasure, in a way that is similar to Aristotle’s view of the contemplative life as the happiest. Of course, for Lucretius this vision is corrupted through his anti-religious bias: knowledge of nature (philosophy/natural science) is essential, as it banishes the fears of the gods and death, providing the highest pleasure. The ultimate success of philosophy is to save us from the “high seas and thick darkness, and enclose it in calm waters” (p. 186) This emphasis on intellectual calm, when recontextualized, provides a compelling ideal for classical Christian educators to encourage a state of mental quietude in their students, necessary for the contemplative work of learning.

Modern research has observed a loss of higher-order thinking during an emotional crisis of fear, referring to it as stress-induced prefrontal cortex downregulation, which impairs executive functions like planning and logical judgment. This impairment occurs because a perceived threat triggers Sympathetic Nervous System activation and an amygdala hijack, forcing the brain to divert resources away from the complex thought processes of the Prefrontal Cortex and towards immediate survival responses. Essentially, the emotional, primal brain overrides the rational brain to prioritize fight-or-flight, leading to a temporary but significant cognitive deficit.

In a similar way, intense desire and craving activate the brain’s dopaminergic reward pathway, effectively causing reward-induced executive dysfunction where the subcortical reward centers override the rational Prefrontal Cortex; this results in a loss of top-down control and a short-sighted focus on immediate gratification over long-term consequence. The transcendent insight here, from Epicureanism to modern research, is the importance of cultivating a tranquil mind for the deeper and more lasting intellectual joy in learning. A lifestyle of emotional swings and sympathetic or dopaminergic overload is, after all, not a recipe for eudaimonia or human flourishing. As Charlotte Mason also emphasized, cultivating a vibrant life of the mind can be an important way of helping children avoid a life of moral debauchery imprisoned to less honorable sensual passions.

Furthermore, the Epicurean focus on a calm physical well-being highlights the importance of the material body for the work of learning. Epicurus teaches that “independence of outward things is a great good, not so as in all cases to use little, but so as to be contented with little if we have not much” (Epicurus, Letter to Menoeceus). This sober reasoning, aimed at securing “health of body and tranquillity of mind” is a pragmatic recognition that physical pain or excessive bodily wants are a hindrance to the sustained mental effort required for wisdom. We might see an agreement with Charlotte Mason’s insistence on the harmful effects of manipulating students into learning through a fear of punishments or the promise of rewards, as these actually undermine higher order thinking and genuine curiosity which has its own reward.

The Epicurean Legacy and the Materialist Ghost

Despite these practical insights regarding the physical substructure of sensation, the value of tranquility for study, and its limited moral applications, the Epicurean framework remains fundamentally flawed, leading directly to the philosophical dead ends that continue to haunt modern secular education.

The Epicurean reduction of man to mortal atoms necessitates a rejection of divine purpose, leading Lucretius to attack the teleological view of nature. The universe was created, not by a “foreseeing mind,” but by the chance “movements and unions of every kind” of atoms (Lucretius, De Rerum Natura I., p. 101).

If the soul is merely material, the quest for truth is limited to the pragmatic aim of avoiding fear and pain. This contrasts sharply with Aristotle’s elevation of the rational soul to contemplate necessary, unchanging truth (epistēmē and nous), culminating in philosophic wisdom (sophia). The reduction of the soul to mechanics anticipates the modern trend of reducing soul, mind and spirit to the mechanics of the amygdala, frontal lobes, and dopaminergic system. We do not contest these physical and physiological discoveries, but the philosophical (and religious!) claims are just that. The fact that there are connected physical processes underlying cognition do not and cannot prove that nothing spiritual or immaterial is present as well. 

And this is not even to mention that strict materialism has no way to account for truth itself or the mind’s perception of it. Philosophically, Epicureanism (like its descendant of secular materialism) provides the intellectual equivalent of a man climbing onto a large branch, facing the trunk of the tree, only to begin sawing off the branch he is lying on. How can material man, a mere jumble of atoms, perceive immaterial truth correctly? Epicurus simply abandoned Plato’s problem of accounting for the transcendentals; he did not solve it.

Likewise, the Epicurean system struggles to maintain objective morality, arguing that virtues are necessary only insofar as they prevent the individual from experiencing temporary breakdowns in the pursuit of his own pleasure. Justice, according to Epicurus, is not intrinsically good:

“Injustice is not in itself an evil, but only in its consequence, viz. the terror which is excited by apprehension that those appointed to punish such offenses will discover the injustice.” (Epicurus, Principal Doctrines)

If morality is merely a “compact” or a convention, it lacks the objective weight necessary for the integrated formation of the soul, which Plato defined as the pursuit of justice achieved through the proper ordering of the rational, spirited, and appetitive parts. Relativism in ethics follows hard on the heels of skeptical materialism.

Pedagogy and Warning: Lessons for the Classical Christian Educator

The Epicurean view serves as a powerful cautionary tale, highlighting how prioritizing mortal pleasure over transcendent purpose undermines the classical Christian mission.

While the Epicureans offered a remarkably acute understanding of how sensation and thought are linked to physical motion and the “fineness of texture” of the body’s material components, the reduction of the entire soul to this atomic mechanism is where the system collapses.

The materialist emphasis, though supporting the importance of attending to the physical health and nourishment of the body for learning, cannot account for the part of the soul (Aristotle’s nous) that is “incapable of being destroyed” and alone is “immortal and eternal”. By reducing the soul to a destructible material form, Epicureanism limits the student’s telos to the mortal pursuit of individual pleasure, contradicting the Christian view of the human person as being made for eternal communion with God and bodily resurrection.

Similarly, the Epicurean ideal of tranquility (ataraxia) is a desirable precursor to focused intellectual study, which the classical Christian educator can and should affirm under the general tradition of schole or leisure (see e.g., Pieper’s Leisure, the Basis of Culture or Chris Perrin’s The Schole Way). However, when this is made the ultimate end of life, it leads to the dangerous avoidance of necessary conflict and labor.

The Epicurean wise person limits desires and seeks simple, easily procured pleasures to “remove the pain of want” and “avoid conflict.” This stands against the classical ideal of training the soul (especially the spirited part) to embrace “physical training to endure pains and sufferings” and the toil necessary for growth. If we prioritize the elimination of distress above all else, we risk producing “unrighteous men, enslaved to their own prejudices and appetites,” who are unwilling to enter the labor and conflict required for both intellectual mastery and moral virtue. The Epicurean philosophy, by grounding the soul in atoms, ultimately confines humanity within the “deepset boundary-stone” of mortality, forever hindering the spiritual revolution of the mind required for true human flourishing.

________________

Aristotle. On the Soul. Translated by J. A. Smith. The Internet Classics Archive. Accessed October, 2025. http://classics.mit.edu//Aristotle/soul.html.

Epicurus. “Letter to Menoeceus.” Translated by Robert Drew Hicks. The Internet Classics Archive. Accessed October, 2025. classics.mit.edu/Epicurus/menoec.html. 

Epicurus. “Principal Doctrines.” Translated by Robert Drew Hicks. The Internet Classics Archive. Accessed October, 2025. classics.mit.edu/Epicurus/princdoc.html. Lucretius. Lucretius on the Nature of Things. Translated by Cyril Bailey. Oxford: At the Clarendon Press, 1910.

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In this case, we are like the haunted house in Pliny that only the Stoic philosopher Athenagoras can liberate by following the ghost to the courtyard and digging up the bones of an ancient murder. This tactic requires an approach that is both open and critical to the great thinkers of the past who have contributed to the jumble of ideas about the soul in contemporary culture. In the last article we responded mostly positively to Plato’s tripartite view of the soul, though of course we rejected the idea of the soul’s preexistence as inconsistent with a biblical worldview. But there is a dark side to Plato’s understanding of the soul that has cast its long shadow on western tradition.

In the article on the soul in Mortimer Adler’s Syntopicon, that masterful guide to the Great Conversation, the perennial question of the soul is framed around a central dispute: Is the soul a distinct substance that inhabits a body, or is it inextricably bound to the body it enlivens? This is not merely an abstract debate. As educators, our answer determines whether we see our task as training a “ghost in a machine,” or as cultivating an integrated, living person. Plato gave us the classic dualist image of the soul as a prisoner longing for release from its bodily cage. This was a helpful, if limited reaction to the materialistic atomism that preceded him in Greek thought. But it is Plato’s student, Aristotle, who offers a third way—a profoundly unified vision that grounds our entire educational project in the rich soil of embodied reality.

From a Christian perspective, Plato’s view might resonate well with the soul’s ongoing existence after death (a truth that Aristotle is also able to account for), but it falls short in accounting for the resurrection of the body, and therefore in what it means to be human from a biblical perspective.

For Aristotle, the soul is not the body’s prisoner but its very principle of life. His psychology (a word originally derived from the Greek for ‘soul’ – psyche), laid out in De Anima, is therefore the necessary foundation for his ethics and thereby his view of proper education. To understand how to cultivate the virtuous mind, we must first understand the living form of the human person. Aristotle’s hylomorphic view of the soul provides the essential framework for understanding and cultivating his five intellectual virtues. In this way, we can shift our pedagogy from the fragmented focus on either mind or body, so common in the modern world, to the integrated formation of the whole person.

A Soul Needs a Body: The Hylomorphic Revolution

Aristotle’s great innovation was to reject both the pure dualism of the Platonists and the crude materialism of the atomists. He charted a middle course known as hylomorphism (from the Greek hyle, “matter,” and morphē, “form”). As scholar Christopher Shields notes, Aristotle saw the soul not as a distinct substance, but as the “principle of organization of a body whose matter has the potentiality for life” (Shields, 2024). In short, the soul is the actuality of a body that has the potential for life. It is the substantial form that makes the matter of a body a living, unified thing.

Aristotle’s own language in De Anima emphasizes this unity with a decisive analogy:

Therefore, we have no need to inquire whether soul and body are one, just as we have no need to inquire whether the wax and its shape are one, nor in general whether the matter of a thing and that of which it is the matter are one. (De Anima, Bk. II, Pt. 1)

This hylomorphic vision is revolutionary for educators. It means we teach embodied souls. The physical world of the classroom—the beauty of the art on the walls, the order of the desks, the posture of the students—is not incidental to learning. It is part of the architecture of the soul’s formation. Because all knowledge begins with the senses, the body is not a distraction from the life of the mind but rather its gateway to the world.

The Ladder of Life: Aristotle’s Ascent and the Imago Dei

Once Aristotle establishes that the soul is the form of the body, he spends the rest of De Anima investigating what this form looks like across the vast spectrum of living things. His method is empirical and observational; he builds his argument from the ground up, starting with the simplest forms of life and ascending to the most complex. This “ladder of life” not only provides a brilliant taxonomy of the natural world but also offers a profound parallel to the biblical account of creation and the nature of man. In a way that mirrors the progression of the days of creation in Genesis, Aristotle’s argument ascends through three fundamental levels of soul, or life-principle.

First, he observes the nutritive soul, the power shared by all living things, from the humblest plant to man. Its functions are the most basic: nutrition, growth, and reproduction. This is the soul in its most foundational sense, the biological urge to sustain oneself and to generate new life. This resonates powerfully with God’s first commands to his creatures in Genesis 1. To the plants, the sea creatures, and to mankind, the imperative is the same: “Be fruitful and multiply” (Gen. 1:22, 28). For both Aristotle and the biblical authors, life’s primary and most universal impulse is a good and ordained principle of flourishing. It affirms the goodness of our createdness and our participation in the fundamental rhythms of the cosmos.

Next, Aristotle identifies the sensitive soul, which belongs to animals and, by extension, to humans. This faculty adds to the nutritive powers a new set of capacities: sensation, appetite (desire and aversion), pleasure and pain, and locomotion. This is the realm of the passions and corresponds to the lowest part of the soul in Plato’s tripartite conception. Here we see the raw material for what the Apostle Paul calls the “flesh”—the seat of desires which, since the Fall, are disordered and at war with the spirit (Gal. 5:17). Yet these passions are not inherently evil; they are God-given capacities for experiencing and navigating the world. The capacity to feel pleasure is a gift that allows us to enjoy God’s creation; the capacity for anger can be a righteous passion against injustice. The Christian life is not about the Stoic eradication of these passions, but their right ordering. As educators, our work in habituation and character formation is largely the work of disciplining and directing this sensitive soul, training our students’ loves so that their desires are aligned with the good.

Finally, at the pinnacle of the earthly ladder, Aristotle arrives at the rational soul, which is unique to human beings and immortal in its essence (see De Anima, Bk. 3, Pt. 5). This is the power to think, to reason, to use language, and to grasp universal truths. It is here that Aristotle’s philosophy most profoundly intersects with the biblical doctrine of the Imago Dei. “Then God said, ‘Let us make man in our image, after our likeness. And let them have dominion…'” (Gen. 1:26). While the Imago Dei is a rich and complex concept, it has always been understood to include this unique human capacity for reason, moral deliberation, and relationship with God. Our ability to abstract the form from the matter, to contemplate the eternal, and to order our lives according to a known good is the echo of our Creator’s rational nature. The ultimate goal of a Christian education is the redemption and sanctification of this power—what Paul calls being “transformed by the renewal of your mind” (Rom. 12:2)—so that our reason is no longer a tool for self-service but an instrument for knowing, loving, and serving God.

This ascent from the nutritive to the sensitive to the rational provides the essential psychological map for our work. We are tending to whole persons, honoring their physical needs, training their passions, and ultimately, guiding their reason toward its proper end. It is the perfection of this rational soul, working in concert with the lower powers, that Aristotle identifies as virtue.

The Soul’s Toolkit: Forging the Intellectual Virtues

In the Great Conversation, a key question about the soul concerns its powers or faculties. Aristotle provides a brilliant taxonomy, showing how the soul’s capacities build upon one another, from the basic nutritive powers we share with plants to the sensitive powers we share with animals, culminating in the rational power unique to humans. It is within the rational soul that the intellectual virtues reside. Aristotle subdivides our reason into two functions: the calculative part, which deliberates about contingent reality (what can be otherwise), and the scientific part, which contemplates necessary reality (what cannot be otherwise). Our task is to bring both to their peak form.

The Virtues of Making and Doing: Technê and Phronēsis

The calculative part of the soul works on the world of action and production, using the data provided by our senses. The two virtues that perfect it are technê and phronēsis.

• Technê (Artistry/Craftsmanship): As we explored in the “Apprenticeship in the Arts” series, technê is the excellence of making, “involving a true course of reasoning” (NE 1140a). It is the virtue of the artisan who can see the form of a chair in a block of wood and guide his tools to bring it into being. When we teach students the technê of grammar, rhetoric, or even long division, we are doing more than transferring skills; we are habituating their souls to reason productively, bringing order and form to matter.
• Phronēsis (Prudence/Practical Wisdom): While technê produces a good product, phronēsis produces good action. This is the master virtue discussed in “Counsels of the Wise,” the “reasoned state of capacity to act with regard to the things that are good or bad for man” (NE 1140b). Phronēsis cannot be learned by abstract rule-following. It requires experience—a deep reservoir of memories built from sensory engagement with the world—to perceive the particulars of a moral situation and deliberate well regarding what is best. We cultivate this by immersing students in history, literature, and scripture, training them to see the world with moral clarity.

The Virtues of Knowing and Contemplating: Epistēmē, Nous, and Sophia

Beyond the changing world of action lies the unchanging world of truth, the domain of the scientific part of the soul. Aristotle argues this highest human faculty, the intellect (nous), is unique among the soul’s powers, describing it as something divine and immortal.

This intellect is separable, impassible, unmixed… and when separated from the body it is that only which it is, and this alone is immortal and eternal… and without this nothing thinks. (De Anima, Bk. III, Pt. 5)

This power of the intellect is what allows us to move from seeing particular examples to grasping universal truths. The virtues that perfect this power are epistēmē, nous, and sophia.

• Epistēmē (Scientific Knowledge): This is knowledge of necessary truths through logical demonstration (NE 1139b). It is the virtue at work in a Euclidean proof or a scientific syllogism.
• Nous (Intuitive Intellect): This is the direct, intuitive grasp of the first principles from which demonstrations begin (NE 1141a). It is the moment of insight, the “seeing” of a self-evident truth that cannot be proven but only understood.
• Sophia (Wisdom): Sophia is the pinnacle of intellectual virtue, the union of nous and epistēmē (NE 1141a). It is the comprehensive understanding of the highest truths, seeing both the foundational principles and the logical conclusions that flow from them. This is the ultimate aim of a classical education: to equip students for the contemplation of ultimate reality.

The Aristotelian Classroom

Aristotle’s answer to the great question of the soul provides us with a fully integrated model for education. Our work is the patient cultivation of the living form, moving students up the ladder of their own God-given capacities.

An Aristotelian classroom begins with rich sensory experience, recognizing the body as the foundation of learning. It proceeds through disciplined apprenticeship to form the virtues of making (technê) and acting (phronēsis). Finally, it guides the student in the joyful work of demonstration (epistēmē) and the profound act of contemplation (nous), all in the service of wisdom (sophia), which finds its ultimate fulfillment in the knowledge and love of God.

References

Adler, Mortimer J. “Chapter 85: Soul.” The Great Books of the Western World, vol. 3: The Great Ideas II. Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc., 1952.

Aristotle. De Anima. Translated by J.A. Smith. The Internet Classics Archive. Accessed August 26, 2025. https://classics.mit.edu/Aristotle/soul.mb.txt.

Shields, Christopher. “Aristotle’s Psychology.” The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Summer 2024 Edition), edited by Edward N. Zalta & Uri Nodelman, https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/sum2024/entries/aristotle-psychology/.

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In this series on Slow Productivity in School, we’ve been exploring the paradox of festina lente (“hasten slowly”). When it comes to the work of learning, sometimes you must go slow to go fast. Or, perhaps more accurately, you must slow down to be truly productive. Taking our cues from Cal Newport’s Slow Productivity: The Lost Art of Accomplishment without Burnout, we are applying his three principles for slow productivity to our teaching practices in classical Christian schools (1. Do Fewer Things, 2. Work at a Natural Pace, 3. Obsess Over Quality). 

After first diagnosing the problem of pseudo-productivity in modern schools, analogous to the hustle culture of modern work environments, we then explored the well-known Latin phrase multum non multa (“much not many things”) under the principle of doing fewer things. The key takeaway is that rather than cutting down on “subjects” to the bare essentials, this principle really applies best to the number and quality of “assignments.” Students in our classical Christian schools can read and study widely without suffering through busywork. Second, we explored the need to work at a natural pace as an explanation of how we can recover school as scholé or leisure. The point is that there are rhythms to ideal learning and racing through worksheets and covering pages of textbooks like the wind isn’t necessarily the best for deep understanding and long term retention.

In this final article, we’re focusing on the principle that we might call the main goal of it all: “Obsess over quality.”  In a way, doing fewer things and working at a natural pace are pointless if they don’t lead to an increased focus on quality. At the beginning we set out the idea that what really lurks behind the phrase multum non multa is a prioritization of depth over breadth and quality over quantity. Slowness is not an end in itself but is meant to serve the real or genuine productivity. Newport describes this final principle of obsessing over quality this way:

“Obsess over the quality of what you produce, even if this means missing opportunities in the short term. Leverage the value of these results to gain more and more freedom in your efforts over the long term” (173). 

For those of us who work in classical Christian schools, as I have argued elsewhere (see Rethinking the Purpose of Education), the true purpose of our educational efforts should be the cultivation of moral, spiritual, and intellectual virtues in our students. If that is the case, then haste can be the enemy of progress. Instead, as master craftsmen, we teachers and educators need to take the necessary time to cultivate mastery in our students. Slipshod, shoddy work, rushed through quickly, without attention to the details and to a host of minor improvements necessary for quality do not “move the needle.” 

There is a real mental shift that must occur here for many of us. We have had the rat-race of school so ingrained in our psyche, that we feel like we are wasting time if we’re not completing a worksheet or a powerpoint buzzer quiz every 20 min. Our media-saturated world too has reduced our attention span and given us ADD for the type of focused effort that actually forges increased quality.

Another culprit to our busyness of attitude is the knowledge-transfer vision of education, as opposed to the traditional liberal arts approach. We tend to envision the main part of education as a process of information download, rather than students developing mastery in handling certain well-worn tools. When we view K-12 education instead through the lens of helping students hone their artistry in the liberal arts, then we will focus more on the students producing high quality interpretations, arguments, and persuasive compositions. 

Students would then develop an artist’s eye for quality and mastery in the creative productions of the liberal arts, including of course in math and science. This focus then multiplies labor by making their own independent reading and thinking that much more effective. They are then able to hasten along the path of lifelong learning with ease, because the way has been smoothed for them by mastering the fundamental skills.

What does this all mean practically for teachers working with students in the classroom? In her book Home Education, Charlotte Mason proposed the habit of perfect execution as a major guiding vision for training young children. She explained,

‘Throw perfection into all you do’ is a counsel upon which a family may be brought up with great advantage. We English, as a nation, think too much of persons, and too little of things, work, execution. Our children are allowed to make their figures or their letters, their stitches, their dolls’ clothes, their small carpentry, anyhow, with the notion that they will do better by-and-by. Other nations–the Germans and the French, for instance–look at the question philosophically, and know that if children get the habit of turning out imperfect work, the men and women will undoubtedly keep that habit up. I remember being delighted with the work of a class of about forty children, of six and seven, in an elementary school at Heidelberg. They were doing a writing lesson, accompanied by a good deal of oral teaching from a master, who wrote each word on the blackboard. By-and-by the slates were shown, and I did not observe one faulty or irregular letter on the whole forty slates. (110-111)

If what Mason says was true of Victorian England, how much more would she note “the Habit of turning out Imperfect Work” in 21st century America. Her example demonstrates that this feature is to a large extent cultural, and may have to do with our Rousseauian focus on children’s “personality” and “developmental readiness.” Our teachers may make excuses for failing to hold out the standard for careful execution of work based on how large the class is (“I simply can’t get around to all sixteen students!”), but this German class of forty puts us to shame.

To be fair, Mason does have a category for setting the bar too high for students. It is possible to obsess over the wrong details or expect a type of detailed quality that is not yet attainable by a young novice. Mason explains, 

No work should be given to a child that he cannot execute perfectly, and then perfection should be required from him as a matter of course. For instance, he is set to do a copy of strokes, and is allowed to show a slateful at all sorts of slopes and all sorts of intervals; his moral sense is vitiated, his eye is injured. Set him six strokes to copy; let him, not bring a slateful, but six perfect strokes, at regular distances and at regular slopes. If he produces a faulty pair, get him to point out the fault, and persevere until he has produced his task; if he does not do it to-day, let him go on to-morrow and the next day, and when the six perfect strokes appear, let it be an occasion of triumph. So with the little tasks of painting, drawing or construction he sets himself–let everything he does be well done. An unsteady house of cards is a thing to be ashamed of. (111)

It can be seen from this that Mason endorses explicitly the principles of doing fewer things at a natural pace, in order to enable an obsession over quality. Clearly she wants students to internalize the mindset of mastery from an early age. 

It’s important to clarify that this is not the sort of perfectionism that expects to never make mistakes in the first place. She is endorsing rather the type of growth mindset that believes that every child can produce high quality and accurate work, if they are given the time and held accountable for doing so. This mindset actually functions to empower the student and enable progress. Filling a slate with incorrect strokes does not improve a student’s handwriting, but tends to solidify bad habits. As my gymnastics coach drill in to us when we were young, “Practice does not make perfect. Practice makes permanent. Perfect practice makes perfect.” 

This paradoxical focus on perfection by actively attending to and correcting mistakes is characteristic of what Daniel Coyle calls deep practice. As he explains, “struggling in certain targeted ways–operating at the edges of your ability, where you make mistakes–makes you smarter. Or to put it a slightly different way, experiences where you’re forced to slow down, make errors, and correct them–as you would if you were walking up an ice-covered hill, slipping and stumbling as you go–end up making you swift and graceful without you realizing it” (The Talent Code, 18). This provides a helpful counter to a misunderstanding of Mason’s insistence that “no work should be given to a child that he cannot execute perfectly,” which might lead us to ease the way too much and avoid appropriate challenges. We have to read in to her version of “cannot” a much stronger belief in the capability of children than we tend to have.

The practical applications of this habit of perfect execution and obsession over quality are endless and as varied as the nature of the many subjects and arts that we teach. So, instead it might be more helpful to open out our gaze again to all three principles, and provide a series of practical applications to the classroom that fuse a holistic vision for slow productivity in school through 1) doing fewer things, 2) working at a natural pace, and 3) obsessing over quality.

Practical Applications of Slow Productivity in School

First, emphasize deep engagement with material over superficial coverage. This will involve a reduced workload, time for contemplation, and the ability to marinate in the knowledge and skills they are gaining.

• Reduced Workload: Instead of assigning a vast quantity of assignments to complete, or having students race through reading the textbook at home, teachers should prioritize fewer, more substantial readings, projects, and discussions. This reduced workload will allow students to delve more deeply into the material rather than skimming or memorizing for tests.
• Time for Contemplation and Reflection: Working at a natural pace means allowing sufficient time for students to truly wrestle with ideas, formulate their own thoughts, and engage in meaningful discussions, rather than rushing from one topic to the next. This leisurely approach coheres with the movement’s emphasis on school as scholé or leisure and the necessary slowness for true contemplation. The time spent discussing and thinking through ideas, even if it includes some rabbit-trails and dead-ends will be time well spent for students making these ideas their own.
• Marinating in Knowledge: Learning isn’t always linear, but has its natural ups and downs, periods of lying fallow and moments for break-throughs. A natural pace acknowledges that some concepts require time to “marinate” in the mind. Teachers should schedule in times of review and moments to pause and revisit challenging texts or ideas over time, allowing for deeper understanding to develop organically.

Second, in agreement with a mastery mindset focus on artistry, teachers should encourage Deep Practice with a focus on correcting mistakes to develop mastery. This will involve favoring perfect execution over speed, process-oriented learning, and slow reading with commonplacing.

• Perfect Execution Over Speed: Instead of rewarding quick completion, focus on mastery of skills and concepts. This might mean allowing students to re-do assignments until they achieve a certain level of understanding, or providing ample practice opportunities without the pressure of a ticking clock. It’s important to remember that education is a not a one-size-fits all: one student may need to repeat the same assignment until it is correct, while other students have gone on to the next. A misplaced emphasis on “fairness” can get in the way of the real goal of coaching each student to mastery.
• Process-Oriented Learning: Emphasize the learning process itself, including research, careful thinking, revision, and refinement, rather than just the final product. Ironically, this aligns with the “obsess over quality” principle. It’s not that the end destination doesn’t matter, but when we let students focus on just getting an assignment done, rather than getting it right, quality gets lost. When we’re willing to linger in the details with a student, then the genuine questions and focus on accuracy make the whole experience that much more meaningful to student and teacher alike.
• Slow Reading and Commonplacing: Encourage students to engage in “slow reading” of classic texts, marking up pages (when possible), asking questions, copying out quotations into a Commonplace Notebook, and truly grappling with the author’s arguments and literary artistry, rather than speed-reading for information. This is where the rubber meets the road in terms of how many Great Books you’re actually trying to get through in that course. At the same time, it’s important to remember that it is possible to go too slow, and so every delay should be qualitatively meaningful. Festina lente (“hasten slowly”) can help the teacher navigate this dance.

Third, we should protect unscheduled time for intellectual play and the pursuit of meaningful interests. There is something to be said for us trying to accomplish too much in school and that backfiring, as students become overly dependent on the structure of school for their ongoing learning. This will look like preserving time for independent exploration both at school and at home and reducing the homework burden by prioritizing the completion of quality work at school:

• Time for Independent Exploration: A natural pace includes periods of less structured time for students. Students need unscheduled time for independent reading, creative pursuits, exploring ideas that pique their interest, and simply thinking without a specific assignment. The idea that “Every minute matters” (popularized by Doug Lemov in Teach Like a Champion) is not without merits, but it depends on the culture into which it is speaking. In low-achieving communities it might bring helpful discipline, but in suburbia with our overscheduled, oversaturated lives, this approach can make children high-strung. Teachers shouldn’t feel the need to cram every minute of every school day but should embrace a proper sense of leisure. This will help to foster the type of genuine curiosity and intellectual growth in students that is not solely dependent on the teacher.
• Reduced Homework Burden: A slow productivity approach means that we should re-evaluate our homework policies and aim for fewer, more meaningful assignments that take a longer time to complete. Our goal should be to reinforce learning rather than simply creating busywork. Also, many of the challenging assignments that we would give them, like writing assignments, should be started in class with the teacher walking around to assist, double check for errors in spelling, punctuation, proper formation of cursive letters, etc. Even in the upper grades a return to this sort of artistic writing process under the guidance of a teacher can help avoid issues with plagiarism and AI-dependence that are only becoming more and more prevalent in our age.

Finally, a focus on slow productivity in school should foster a culture of patient endurance rather than an obsession with a quick fix and short-term results. This will look like embracing the long-term vision of classical education, recognizing that some of the best growth in students occurs over the course of years rather than months, and therefore fostering resilience and grit in students and parents alike:

• Long-Term Vision: Classical education plays out as a long game, building a strong foundation over many years. A natural pace reinforces the idea that significant intellectual growth is a marathon, not a sprint. Slow productivity sees the results of genuine accomplishment over the course of the whole K-12 sequence, rather than week, month or quarter of the school year. This long-term vision helps us sit patiently in the here and now and focus on mastery of the basics in a given area where a student struggles, rather than giving up or opting out.
• Resilience and Grit: By allowing for a natural pace, students learn that challenges take time to overcome and that persistence, not frantic effort, leads to genuine accomplishment. The insistence on facing our mistakes and learning from them, rather than fleeing to easier tasks, develops a resilient attitude that will serve them well for life. Ultimately, a slow productivity mindset makes kids gritty, while also giving them adequate recovery time to maintain the long trek of their education.

I hope you enjoyed the Slow Productivity in School series. I’m planning a webinar and consulting pathway to follow up on these ideas and help your teachers apply multum non multa, festina lente and the habit of perfect execution or coaching in deep practice in your school.

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In this series, I am taking my cue from Cal Newport’s helpful book Slow Productivity: The Lost Art of Accomplishment Without Burnout and applying his insights to our expectations for student work in classical Christian schools. Like the modern office, forms of pseudo-productivity dominate the modern school system–a fact that explains how children can spend more time on school and edutainment than ever before and yet scores and cultural literacy continue to decline. 

The problem is that the quantity of easy assignments, like worksheets or entertaining presentations or videos, has crowded out the quality of learning. We have sacrificed depth to a shallow breadth and traded long term learning for an easy-to-teach, easy-to-grade hamster wheel of activities. 

In our last article we explored Cal Newport’s first principle for slow productivity: do fewer things. Resonating with the Latin saying, multum non multa (much not many), this principle is best interpreted as calling for fewer assignments of higher quality rather than fewer subjects in a day. We supported this classical application of the principle from no less revered a source than the Roman oratorical teacher Quintilian, who argued for, not against, wide reading across many subjects. But this doesn’t mean we can’t cut down on busy work and focus on the highest value activities for deep learning.

Part of the point of this assertion is that there may actually be an inverse relationship between the sheer number of assignments in school (or projects at work) and the real production of value or quality. As Newport explained near the beginning of the book, “The relentless overload that’s wearing us down is generated by a belief that ‘good’ work requires increasing busyness–faster responses to email and chats, more meetings, more tasks, more hours” (7). But this busyness itself becomes a drag on true productivity because of the “overhead cost” as Newport has called it, of each new project or assignment.

This overhead cost leads to a waste of labor in the hurry through activities that are not effective in creating value, which in our case would be the durable learning and cultivation of intellectual virtues in a student. Busywork does not develop the mind of a scholar. 

These considerations lead us naturally in to Cal Newport’s second principle: work at a natural pace. The connection is obvious because the important work that does transform a student into a scholar requires a certain slowness of pace to be effective. Focusing too much on efficiency may cause us to short-circuit the process, leaving the student no better off than when she started. After all, Rome wasn’t built in a day. True achievement takes time. You can’t rush greatness.

Newport unpacks his second principle of slow productivity for knowledge workers by calling for a sustainable and almost luxurious approach:

“Don’t rush your most important work. Allow it instead to unfold along a sustainable timeline, with variations in intensity, in settings conducive to brilliance.” (116)

His encouragement not to rush is made possible because crucial time has been preserved by doing fewer things. This move enables our work to be of higher importance. Students likewise will experience increased motivation when they sense that assignments are more naturally significant or meaningful. Busywork, on the other hand, demotivates a student, since he can feel its intrinsic pointlessness.

We should pause to note that just because a project takes a long time does not ensure it is important or meaningful. Teachers seeking to apply this principle in their classical school should consider what skills of hand and eye will be honed, what intellectual virtues like wisdom and understanding, will be developed before launching a time-consuming project that is ancillary to their curriculum. One litmus test might be whether it integrates the liberal arts with the common arts, while solidifying meaningful knowledge, as Chris Hall advocates for in his book Common Arts Education.

Cal Newport draws from the examples of ground breaking scientists to make the point of what a “sustainable timeline, with variations in intensity” ought to look like. He explains,

“These great scientists of times past were clearly ‘productive’ by any reasonable definition of the term. What else can you call it when someone literally changes our understanding of the universe? At the same time, however, the pace at which they toiled on their momentous discoveries seemed, by modern standards, to be uneven, and in some cases almost leisurely.” (111)

Newport’s use of the word “leisurely” resonates remarkably with an emphasis of the classical Christian education movement: recovering school as leisure. The Greek word from which school is derived, scholé, meant something like “leisure.” Christopher Perrin of Classical Academic Press has helpfully advocated for a recovery of scholé in school, drawing from Josef Pieper’s Leisure: The Basis of Culture. Perrin defines scholé as “undistracted time…” in his book The Scholé Way. Likewise, Newport’s description of “settings conducive to brilliance” resonates with the classical education movement’s emphasis on beauty and aesthetics for the school environment. What could be more inspiring than the idea of restful learning at a natural pace in a beautiful and uplifting atmosphere!

Newport and Perrin are both quick to clarify that the feeling of intensity for work should vary. Productive school work, like scientific discovery, will have periods of intense effort, as well as restful or leisurely contemplation. Working at a natural pace means that we as teachers are attentive to these ups and downs. We don’t try to force an unnatural sameness, either of rigor or rest. There is a natural rhythm to quality accomplishment and genuine learning that God has built into the fabric of existence. Just as the Sabbath principle governs work in general, so too must peaceful learning and restful contemplation balance out more strenuous learning activities.

It might initially feel like a cop out to give more time in class to a challenging activity like writing. But it may be that it ultimately pays itself back in the genuine progress made by the student. After all, their minds are likely freshest for that type of focused effort during the school day. And teachers can actively assist in the process of coaching when they are present. Are we really surprised that students turn in poorly written essays, when they are forced to do it in the energy trough of the afternoon or the mental haze of the late evening? 

Still some will decry the loss of productivity. But the secret is opening out our vision of student productivity to a longer time horizon. As Newport discerns from the case of those leisurely scientists,

“Timescale matters. When viewed at the fast scale of days and weeks, the efforts of historic thinkers like Copernicus and Newton can seem uneven and delayed. When instead viewed at the slow scale of years, their efforts suddenly seem undeniably and impressively fruitful.” (113)

This perspective shift undergirds another influential Latin saying, festina lente (“hasten slowly”), which calls for a paradox of slow hurry. There must be a purposeful movement in a meaningful direction at the same time as a willingness to delay over the details to ensure quality and a student’s developing mastery. Great teachers can discern when to slow down and when to hasten on.

Part of this is because skill development benefits naturally from providing activities with the proper challenge. Mihaly Csikszentmihalyiy, the famous positive psychologist called this the flow channel, which is characterized by an avoidance of boredom because of the challenge being too low on the one hand, but also by preventing the anxiety caused by too high a level of challenge. Within this channel we are much more likely to experience the flow state, where time passes in effortless focus as we are absorbed in a meaningful activity. This modern discovery is part and parcel of the joy of learning as I have written extensively elsewhere. 

For our purposes, we can note that flow comes in many forms, both vigorous and contemplative, but more recent discoveries have shown it to be only one step in the flow cycle, which includes both a struggle phase beforehand while getting into flow and a recovery phase after which allows the mind needed rest for entering the flow cycle again (see Rian Doris, flowstate.com). One cannot be “on” all the time, so there should varying types and levels of focused effort throughout the school day and throughout the weeks and months of a school year.

While he may not personally connect flow state with his ideas of deep work or slow productivity, Newport does connect his thoughts back to Aristotle’s vision of eudaimonia (“flourishing or happiness”) and the contemplative life:

“In the Nicomachean Ethics, which would have been familiar to any serious thinker from the time of Copernicus onward, Aristotle identified deep contemplation as the most human and worthy of all activities. The general lifestyle of the scientist, by this logic, had a worthiness of its own, independent of any specific accomplishments in the moment. Little value was to be gained in rushing, as the work itself provided reward. This mindset supported a Renaissance-style understanding of professional efforts as one element among many that combine to create a flourishing existence.” (115)

What this masterful quote adds to our discussion so far is the intrinsic value of meaningful work. In addition to its practical value in transforming the student, learning should be done for its own sake and as its own reward. The hustle and bustle of modern schooling necessities against this more natural and humane approach. Meanwhile it fosters grade grubbing and the worst type of pragmatism in education. 

In the next and final installment, we’ll explore Cal Newport’s final principle of slow productivity, “obsess over quality” and wrap up the series with a summary of practical applications from all three principles. Share your thoughts and experiences in the comments below!

The post Slow Productivity in School: Part 3, Work at a Natural Pace appeared first on .

“A philosophy for organizing knowledge work efforts in a sustainable and meaningful manner, based on the following three principles:

1. Do fewer things.
2. Work at a natural pace.
3. Obsess over quality.” (41)

In this series of articles we’re unpacking and reapplying Newport’s insights to see how they bring to light some of the core principles of classical education. For instance, the phrase multum non multa has often been used to emphasize an approach similar to his principles: depth over breadth, and quality over quantity. The phrase comes from a letter of Pliny the Younger 7.9-15 and originally refers to his advice for a student to read much, not many things. This could be taken to mean that he read the right books or the best books over and over again rather than simply reading more. It thus stands for an important classical prioritization of the quality of material read or studied, over simply checking the box of more subjects or books, regardless of their importance or enduring value.

In this article we’re going to unpack Cal Newport’s first principle of doing fewer things and apply it to the students’ work of learning in school. Along the way we’ll discuss some of the complex problems around what this means for the number of subjects, the structure of the school day, and the type and number of assignments we give to students. Let’s dig in.

In the context of knowledge work on the job, Cal Newport explains how his revolutionary idea of doing fewer things might play itself out:

“Strive to reduce your obligations to the point where you can easily imagine accomplishing them with time to spare. Leverage this reduced load to more fully embrace and advance the small number of projects that matter most.” (53)

As I’ve said before, Newport’s book will likely be helpful and inspiring to classical school administrators as well. The dizzying variety of demands involved in running a small school can be overwhelming. Cal Newport’s not alone in the business and productivity workspace to argue for focused effort on the work that matters most and the ruthless elimination of secondary obligations that are really distractions. It’s almost a mantra, even if still widely unpracticed. For instance, in their book The One Thing: The Surprisingly Simple Truth behind Extraordinary Results, Gary W. Keller and Jay Papasan made the best-seller lists by arguing that “success isn’t a game that’s won by whoever does the most,” but that instead people should ask themselves, “What’s the ONE Thing I can do such that by doing it everything else will be easier or unnecessary?” In this context, Newport’s “Do fewer things” feels almost modest and more realistic in its understatement. 

Doing fewer things perhaps resonates most obviously with the multum non multa saying. I like to think of it most of all as embracing depth, not breadth. If you try to do too much in work or in school, you will often end up doing shallow, incomplete work of questionable quality. Committing to doing fewer things feels scary, as if we are abandoning the societal value accorded the sacred claims of “productivity” in the first place. But it actually enables the type of focus and attention necessary for the true productivity or accomplishment that moves the needle (to invoke a worn-out business cliche…). As Newport’s explanation reminds us, some projects matter more than others, and it can easily be demonstrated that this is the case in school too. 

Busyness and relentless activities do not produce great students. In the tradition there was a recognition that certain studies would serve as the foundation of other studies. The liberal arts were the “tools of learning,” according to Dorothy Sayers, that would enable the student to work as a craftsman of general learning and knowledge and therefore continue learning well for life. The problem of modern education was focusing on teaching “subjects” rather than these tools, and thus wasting labor. We can see how one of the central clarion calls of our educational reform movement (Sayers’ “The Lost Tools of Learning” essay) resonates with the call to do fewer things. What are those things we should do, according to Sayers? Grammar, dialectic and rhetoric. And all the subjects that you might choose are merely grist for the mill. The focus of the educator should be on the students’ accomplishment or productivity in handling these tools. 

This is one helpful way of approaching the challenge, but it requires the consistent intentionality of the teacher to work against the grain of her culture in a purely mental way. If the curriculum writers and designers consistently pull her back to the rigmarole of manyness over muchness, it is worth questioning how much has really changed here. This has led some classical education leaders to radical proposals like putting everything on block periods and cutting classes down to the bare minimum of “classical subjects.” The obvious problem with this is which subjects to cut. It may be easier in the upper grades to collapse history, literature and Bible or theology into one another through an integrated humanities course, as does the Omnibus series of Veritas Press. But in this case, we have not really saved time or done fewer things; we have simply combined or grouped these areas of study together. In the meantime, we have actually added to the number of subjects or courses studied by introducing philosophical texts into K-12 education, along with logic and rhetoric courses. 

In the lower grades we might ask what we are cutting with equal, if not stronger, force. Surely, we are not cutting phonics or grammar, penmanship or composition, history, literature or Bible? Perhaps we should cut mathematics and science? Or the unnecessary fine arts, like music and drawing? Are there any advocates for cutting PE? How about recess? What does “do fewer things” and multum non multa practically mean in a modern school? Is it really classical to have fewer subjects? 

My answer to the last question, and the answer of at least one stream of the classical tradition, is no. The problem is not the number of subjects but the approach to assignments and the pace and quality of student work. Quintilian, the famed Roman rhetoric teacher of the 1st century, provides the most ancient and authoritative voice for this embrace of manyness in subjects, if not in assignments. In his Institutes of Oratory Quintilian commends the importance of early training from the grammarian, and in that context emphasizes just how many subjects of books the student should read and learn from in his early years:

“Nor is it sufficient to have read the poets only; every class of writers must be studied, not simply for matter, but for words, which often receive their authority from writers. Nor can grammar be complete without a knowledge of music, since the grammarian has to speak of meter and rhythm; nor, if he is ignorant of astronomy, can he understand the poets, who, to say nothing of other matters, so often allude to the rising and setting of the stars in marking the seasons; nor must he be unacquainted with philosophy, both on account of numbers of passages, in almost all poems, drawn from the most abstruse subtleties of physical investigation, and also on account of Empedocles among the Greeks, and Varro and Lucretius among the Latins, who have committed the precepts of philosophy to verse.” (1.4.4; Translated by John Selby Watson, edited by Curtis Dozier and Lee Honeycutt.)

When Quintilian says that “every class of writers must be studied,” he encompasses the breadth of a humane and liberal education, not a bare-bones trivium training (without sufficient “grist for the mill”; let us give Dorothy Sayers her due…). We can hear the liberal arts categories, especially the quadrivium, endorsed explicitly in his mention of music and astronomy. And he specifically goes beyond those categories even to embrace the reading of philosophy, not after formal study of grammar and then rhetoric is completed, but before and during. 

It’s passages like these that show how insufficient a bare bones view of what it meant for ancients to study the trivium is, from the point of view of what we in modern times call “subjects.” Quintilian’s grammar stage (if we can call it that) embraced wide and humane reading across the subjects. We might even say that it encourages breadth over depth in reading, contrary to the apt phrase of Pliny the Younger. 

If any would claim that we are overstraining Quintilian’s context to apply it to the argument about the number of subjects for young students, we can point to an even clearer context where Quintilian specifically endorses sending our young orator in training to the teachers of grammar, music, geometry, acting and dance, and then answers the common objection of his day: 

“It is a common question whether, supposing all these things [grammar and music and geometry and acting and dance] are to be learned, they can all be taught and acquired at the same time, for some deny that this is possible, as the mind must be confused and wearied by so many studies of different tendency for which neither the understanding, nor the body, nor time itself, can suffice. Even though mature age may endure such labor, it is said, that of childhood ought not to be thus burdened.” (1.12.1)

Here we see him specifically take up the number of “subjects” studied at one and the same time, i.e. the question of a student’s course load, as it were. The supposed confusion and weariness might mimic our own concerns for leisure, contemplation and restful learning. His answer is so stunning and helpful that it is worth reproducing in full:

“2. But these reasoners do not understand how great the power of the human mind is, that mind which is so busy and active and which directs its attention, so to speak, to every quarter so that it cannot even confine itself to do only one thing, but bestows its force upon several, not merely in the same day, but at the same moment. 3. Do not players on the harp, for example, exert their memory and attend to the sound of their voice and the various inflections of it, while at the same time they strike part of the strings with their right hand and pull, stop, or let loose others with their left, while not even their foot is idle, but beats time to their playing, all these acts being done simultaneously? 4. Do not we advocates, when surprised by a sudden necessity to plead, say one thing while we are thinking of what is to follow, and while at the very same moment, the invention of arguments, the choice of words, the arrangement of matter, gesture, delivery, look, and attitude are necessarily objects of our attention? If all these considerations of so varied a nature are forced, as by a single effort, before our mental vision, why may we not divide the hours of the day among different kinds of study, especially as variety itself refreshes and recruits the mind, while on the contrary, nothing is more annoying than to continue at one uniform labor? Accordingly, writing is relieved by reading, and the tedium of reading itself is relieved by changes of subject. 5. However many things we may have done, we are yet to a certain degree fresh for that which we are going to begin. Who, on the contrary, would not be stupefied if he were to listen to the same teacher of any art, whatever it might be, through the whole day? But by change a person will be recruited, as is the case with respect to food, by varieties of which the stomach is re-invigorated and is fed with several sorts less unsatisfactorily than with one. 6. Or let those objectors tell me what other mode there is of learning. Ought we to attend to the teacher of grammar only, and then to the teacher of geometry only, and cease to think, during the second course, of what we learned in the first? Should we then transfer ourselves to the musician, our previous studies being still allowed to escape us? Or while we are studying Latin, ought we to pay no attention to Greek? Or to make an end of my questions at once, ought we to do nothing but what comes last before us? “

“7. So much more easy is it to do many things one after the other, than to do one thing for a long time.” (1.12.2-6, 7; pp. 61-62)

In this passage Quintilian makes a lock tight argument for our common practice of packing in subjects in period blocks and shifting a student’s attention from one to the other to make determinate progress in one, only to break off as fatigue begins to set in and start onto something new. While we may decry the school bell, as savoring of the factory, there is a sense in which this practice of the periodization of school into discrete subjects is both classical and incredibly powerful. Charlotte Mason had likewise repeated the Victorian proverb, “A change is as good as a rest.” It may even have been derived from this context, as Mason herself found an endorsement of narration in the early pages of Quintilian and her own familiar analogy of food and appetite for student learning, with variety as increasing the appetite or curiosity of the student. This is Quintilian’s early take on the science of human attention, as we have since explained through neuroscience: novelty increases both motivation and attention.

Does this mean block periods are bad? Not necessarily. The nature of the complex tasks, like socratic dialogue or writing, may actually benefit from longer stretches of work, especially for older students. But it is worth questioning whether the productivity claims of focusing on one project over multiple hour blocks apply to the education of children. As Quintilian concludes, it is easier to do many things, one after the other, than to persist in a single activity or project for a long time.

If, then, we have dismissed the spurious application of “Do Fewer Things” to cutting the number of subjects and the periods of modern school, what does that leave us with? Cut busywork! Cut the number of assignments down and instead ensure that students complete quality, complex work. Replace the endless hamster wheel of worksheets with written narrations and essay responses. Instead of coloring in preprinted outlines, have students develop an eye for careful copywork and artistry of their own. 

In the next articles on working at a natural pace and obsessing over quality, we’ll explain further what this application of “Do Fewer Things” looks like as we embrace depth over breadth in our approach to work, rather than cutting important subjects from K-12 education.

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I recently read Slow Productivity: The Lost Art of Accomplishment Without Burnout by Cal Newport, which was fascinating for its practical application of this principle to the pseudo-productivity so common in our working world today. Emails, app channels, meetings, and looking busy dominate the landscape of office work, to the detriment, all too often, of not only true productivity, but also appropriate margin and work-life balance. While I found the book personally helpful and encouraging for school administration, I was also struck by the phrase “slow productivity” and its helpfulness for conveying the classical approach to our students’ work in school. 

In this series of short articles, I want to unpack Cal Newport’s principles for slow productivity and apply them, instead, to pedagogy at a K-12 classical school. My thesis is that teachers should guide students in the kind of slow productivity in school that optimizes durable learning and cultivates the intellectual virtues. But first we should uncover the analogous problem to our modern office woes. 

Like the office, too often modern educators are fooled by various types of pseudo-productivity that end up undercutting the goals of our educational programs. Time is filled up with “busywork” for students, we race through books regardless of their value for deep learning, and plan “learning activities” that actually undercut the development of genuine intellectual virtues while favoring ease of implementation for student and teacher alike. Minutes and hours crammed with edutainment (I can’t believe that’s even a word…) mirror the hustle and bustle of the office, with little to show for all this supposed productivity. 

What is going wrong here in educational terms? We are focused less on the quality of student work, than on the quantity of filling time with easy-to-apply learning activities. Worksheets, coloring sheets, entertaining educational videos, and flashy, lowest-common-denominator “literature” are filling up the precious educational hours of our students. The inevitable outcome of such fast and easy productivity is low quality and low expectations. What is lost on many modern educators is how all this twaddle and twaddling activities (I am borrowing and reapplying Charlotte Mason’s preferred term for poor quality, childish reading material…) is harming the development of our children. 

When we compare the educational value of, say, a student writing a paragraph or two in cursive of their own volition and drawn from their own memory of a rich text they have read, with any of the aforementioned activities, which are so common in modern education, we can see how much of modern education is best classified as pseudo-productivity. Considered from the vantage point of student attainment, filling out single word answers in a pre-packaged worksheet doesn’t hold a candle to the intellectual virtues honed and developed by, for instance, a written narration. Why is it that we settle for pseudo productivity at school? 

There are likely multiple culprits, but one of them has a similar origin to the historical backdrop of knowledge work pseudo-productivity that Newport describes in his book: the factory mindset. The idea of “productivity” itself rings of the revolution in efficiency brought about in the aftermath of the industrial revolution. As Newport explains, 

There was, of course, a well-known human cost to this emphasis on measurable improvement. Working on an assembly line is repetitive and boring, and the push for individuals to be more efficient in every action creates conditions that promote injury and exhaustion. But the ability for productivity to generate astonishing economic growth in these sectors swept aside most such concerns. (17-18)

Efficiency experts like Frederick Winslow Taylor applied this science in factory settings to great effect. Such gains captured the imagination of the world, including managers of knowledge workers and educational leaders and curriculum designers. The problem is that assessing or judging quality ended up being so much trickier in the knowledge and learning sectors.

This lure of efficiency is part of why Bloom’s Taxonomy often ends up backfiring in a management-centered approach to education. The efficiency of systems of grading, quick completion of “assignments” and tying “learning activities” to standards crowd out the need for careful judgment and high standards. Even if Bloom’s Taxonomy was intended to push educators toward more complex cognitive skills on the hierarchy, it is nevertheless possible to make students perform an easy or shallow “synthesis” task, as it is a knowledge task. Narration as a complex and multifaceted “learning activity” might seem to rank as merely a knowledge task, but it engages the creativity, memory and artistry of the student, while solidifying their understanding of the new story or history they encountered. 

Bloom’s Taxonomy has tried to treat knowledge work in school, just like steps in an assembly line. One part at a time, building up to higher levels of complexity. The only problem is that the brain and knowledge work, simply do not work best like that; isolating bits of information and steps in tasks to their lowest or most basic level (except at the very beginning of something new) can tend to stereotype and bore the minds of our students. They race through “material” without really learning or understanding it, and quickly forget the little that they have learned. Slow productivity in school is the only real productivity.

Cal Newport defines the solution to pseudo-productvity as slow productivity, explaining it as 

“A philosophy for organizing knowledge work efforts in a sustainable and meaningful manner, based on the following three principles:

1. Do fewer things.
2. Work at a natural pace.
3. Obsess over quality.” (41)

In the following articles of this series, we’ll unpack each of these three principles and see how they might apply to student work in school. In the meantime, share in the comments section how you have seen pseudo-productivity invading modern schooling, as well as any ideas or proven methods for ensuring student work is deep and of high quality.

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Imagination. The word brings so much to mind for us today. If there’s one thing that everybody can agree on for children, it’s the need to help them develop a vivid imagination through school, play, and well… everything they do. Or perhaps, ‘develop a vivid imagination’ is the wrong way of putting it.

“Every child is born blessed with a vivid imagination,” said Walt Disney. “But just as a muscle grows flabby with disuse, so the bright imagination of a child pales in later years if he ceases to exercise it.”

So maybe it’s not children who need to develop an imagination, it’s us adults who need to rekindle it. 

Maybe the problem is school. Maybe we’re the ones who educate students out of imagination and creativity, as Sir Kenneth Robinson has claimed. In a TED talk from 2007, entitled “Do Schools Kill Creativity?” he argued that we have rethink schooling entirely for our new era because of how our organized structures of school only focus on one type of “academic achievement.” This has become a popular idea and might be connected to another recent movement in education: Howard Gardner’s idea of multiple intelligences. There isn’t just IQ, but other imaginative and creative areas of intelligence that traditional schooling disregards or at least categorizes as not as valuable. In addition to verbal and mathematical intelligence (which are often prominent in standardized testing), Gardner posits that there are visual-spatial, bodily-kinesthetic, musical, interpersonal, and other intelligences. The multiple intelligences theory has had its critics. One article said,

Gardner’s theory has come under criticism from both psychologists and educators. These critics argue that Gardner’s definition of intelligence is too broad and that his eight different “intelligences” simply represent talents, personality traits, and abilities. Gardner’s theory also suffers from a lack of supporting empirical research…. Despite this, the theory of multiple intelligences enjoys considerable popularity with educators. Many teachers utilize multiple intelligences in their teaching philosophies and work to integrate Gardner’s theory into the classroom. (see Gardner’s Theory of Multiple Intelligences (verywellmind.com))

Some parts of this idea resonate with a postmodern retreat from any standards in education. Everyone has their own special intelligence area, no matter plummeting math and reading scores. Perhaps there’s also a fair bit of sentimentality about childhood in our talk about imagination. But on the other hand, many of these other types of intelligence that Gardner proposed are staples of the classical tradition: music, gymnastic, the prudence to engage with other people in the human world, and the rhetorical skills to persuade and communicate well interpersonally. Maybe Gardner is just repackaging lost arts of the classical tradition as a new psycho-educational theory. Of course, we’ve all probably felt in our own lives how the drudgery of school or work or daily life can seem to socialize us out of imagination and our creative intelligences. 

But it’s not just one side of the aisle that is saying we need to reinvigorate education and modern life with imagination. Anthony Esolen, a conservative Catholic professor and social commentator, wrote a witty book entitled, 10 Ways to Destroy the Imagination of Your Child. It’s written kind of like C.S. Lewis’ Screwtape Letters, with biting irony showing us what not to do. For Esolen the culprits of our loss of imagination actually is the result of our anti-traditionalism. It’s because we’ve lost or abandoned things that progressives would decry, like the power of memory in school, or because we are “effacing the glorious differences between the sexes.” We’ve lost traditional childhood games, and won’t let kids pick their own teams anymore. We overly separate children from the adult world, and we deny the existence of transcendent and permanent things, we also keep children indoors too much because we’re afraid of them getting dirty or hurting themselves. (I rely partly on Justin Taylor’s review on the Gospel Coalition for this assessment.)

To his list from over a decade ago we could add a host of growing modern phenomena:

• Overstimulation through media
• Over scheduling in “activities” and lack of free play
• Loss of fairy tales and quality imaginative literature in school
• Focus on career prep, practicality, STEM, standardized testing and grades

So perhaps we can land on a thesis with surprising contemporary agreement: we need more imagination in childhood and in school. But our agreement may be only surface deep, as the devil really is in the details.

What is imagination anyway? How do we cultivate it? What might Christianity and the classical tradition have to say about the matter? I hope to open the discussion for us of some of these very big and daunting questions. First, we’ll discuss what imagination is and how we use our imaginations all the time in all sorts of ways. Second, we’ll consider how we can cultivate the imagination in our classes and subjects, before concluding that a well-developed Christian imagination should be an important goal of our schools. 

What Is Imagination?

First, let’s try to answer the question “What is Imagination?” It’s one of those terms we’re happy to use all the time, but I’m not sure anyone really knows what we’re talking about. Is it just another word for creativity? Or is it a faculty of the human mind? Is imagination just something we use at Disneyland, or when reading fantastical literature, or is it more far reaching than that? Well, I think the latter in both cases. The imagination is an ability of ours as human beings that deeply informs who we are, how we think, and how we live and relate to others, even if we don’t consider ourselves a very imaginative person. 

When I am trying to define important ideas like this, I often go to Aristotle, that great philosopher, at least as a starting point. Avid readers of Educational Renaissance will no doubt be laughing here, because have been writing on Aristotle’s intellectual virtues for a few years already. But you will remember that, no, imagination is not one of the intellectual virtues, and I’m not about to make it one. I don’t even think the imagination is mentioned in Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics… but I was reading Aristotle’s De Anima (“On the Soul”) this summer for a series on The Soul of Education and having unthinkingly assigned myself the absurd task of imagining up a talk on imagination some months ago for the ACCS Endorsed Teacher Training Workshop at Coram Deo Academy (where I serve as Principal), I happily happened upon a passage where Aristotle does in fact define imagination. And I think his definition actually helps us as educators to understand what we’re really after for our students.

The word ‘imagination’ in English pretty clearly features the word ‘image’ in it. And Aristotle roughly defines it as the faculty of bringing images before the mind. In Greek the word is phantasia which comes from a word for light and vision, having a similar idea. It’s the ability to bring pictures before your mind that you are not currently seeing or experiencing; in fact, for Aristotle, it could be more than just pictures, it could include other senses like smells or sounds. It is not sense or memory, because if imagination were just limited to what we were experiencing or had experienced, it would be very limited. The very power of imagination is that we can blend and expand on those things we have seen or experienced from our memories, creating something new. It is a synthetic faculty, bringing together disparate things to make of them something that did not exist before. In that sense, imagination is not like the intellectual virtues which for Aristotle are always true, it’s not knowledge or understanding, because those can’t be false but imagination can be. We can have “vain imaginations” as scripture says, but we can also have the glorious imaginings of faith, where we walk precisely not by our sight.

I hope you can see that on this definition, imagination actually looms larger in education than Disney could have imagined. Imagination is connected to memory, creative production and thought. It is like a master faculty of the human mind that underlies all sorts of more developed intellectual abilities. On this definition, then, I would assert that Disney’s claim that children are born with a vivid imagination is plainly false. Children are certainly born with an imaginative ability that they will naturally use as human beings, but it’s only the trained and developed imagination of the great painter or artist, engineer or writer, that is vivid and alive to its full potential. 

It certainly is possible that children would begin to disuse their imaginative and creative abilities in some areas through traditional schooling, but it is likewise true that they are learning to imagine in ways that they never could have on their own, if it weren’t for us. J.R.R. Tolkien did not lose his imagination by learning Latin and Greek and old English and history. It was the store of memories that he gained through his studies that allowed him to build a compelling imaginative world that arguably exceeded the depth and breadth of any imaginative writer before him. 

I use the example of Tolkien because I think it illustrates the point well. But I think there is a real danger in limiting our view of imagination to fantastical literature only. Imaginations of all different sorts underlie all of the subjects that we teach and in fact our very lives. I mentioned before the possibility of good or bad imaginations. Scripture would teach us to consider that some human imaginings are fleshly, worldly and stereotyped, while others might be spiritually led and philosophically grounded. Aristotle himself asserts that “imagination may be false.” 

This brings us to the first and perhaps the most important point for us to remember as classical Christian educators about the imagination. The imaginings of the heart may be deceitful, they may lead us astray. This is so important to know as we are shepherding our students morally and spiritually. But it is also key academically. The problem in science or math or history class may be that the students imaged into their own mind an inaccurate representation of the truth that we are trying to teach them. We must work with them to correct the picture that they think they know and help them imagine appropriately. Often, this entails going back to the source images, storyline, details. We have to get them to talk out and explain the picture they have in their minds, so that we can surgically assist them in altering it. This process can be difficult; it’s more difficult if we aren’t even aware of how things went wrong. This is also why getting the initial exposure of the vision of some truth right is so important: it’s easier to teach something the right way first, than to struggle with trying to reteach again and again and again.

But before we go too far into applications of this understanding of the imagination, we need to pause and detail just how broad this faculty of imagining really is. A few weeks ago my dad was visiting us from California. And I asked him what he thought about the imagination. My dad is a Christian therapist or counselor, so I guess I shouldn’t have been surprised that he immediately brought up the role of the imagination in mental health and addiction. He talked about how in dealing with challenging and painful circumstances, healthy individuals are able to, in some sense, escape or find positive refuge in imagining a calm and peaceful environment of some kind. He teaches his clients to do this. It made me think of a poem by William Wordsworth that I memorized in high school and taught in some of my first years of teaching:

I wandered lonely as a cloud

That floats on high o’er vales and hills,

When all at once I saw a crowd,

A host, of golden daffodils;

Beside the lake, beneath the trees,

Fluttering and dancing in the breeze.

Continuous as the stars that shine

And twinkle on the milky way,

They stretched in never-ending line

Along the margin of a bay:

Ten thousand saw I at a glance,

Tossing their heads in sprightly dance.

The waves beside them danced; but they

Out-did the sparkling waves in glee:

A poet could not but be gay,

In such a jocund company:

I gazed—and gazed—but little thought

What wealth the show to me had brought:

For oft, when on my couch I lie

In vacant or in pensive mood,

They flash upon that inward eye

Which is the bliss of solitude;

And then my heart with pleasure fills,

And dances with the daffodils.

Did you catch that last stanza? Seeing this pleasant nature scene provided Wordsworth with a type of wealth, that he could then recollect, imagine again to himself afresh when in “vacant or in pensive mood.” He had gained the ability to cheer his heart against the trials of life. This is part of what our children miss, when they don’t have time in nature.

So, there is this positive role that imagination plays for aesthetics, for quality of life, and even for developing good taste for the higher pleasures. This is part of what a rich classical education is meant to give our students. But negatively, my dad also discussed the role of the imagination in addiction, how addicts will imagine to themselves beforehand the satisfaction of their desire. This shows us that the imagination is a moral and spiritual faculty, that requires self-control and training to focus on, to think on, as Paul says, “whatever is true, whatever is honorable, whatever is just, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is commendable, if there is any excellence, if there is anything worthy of praise” (Phil 4:8). The content of our and our students’ imaginings matters and it’s not something we should leave up to chance. Charlotte Mason, the British Christian educator of the late 19th century, also discusses the positive moral value of giving students a vital relationship with every area of knowledge. Without this, human beings are more easily a prey to the lower and immoral pleasures on offer in our world.

In addition, imagination plays a role in living a prudent and virtuous life through our ability to imagine possible futures. Through imagination we can anticipate the negative consequences of our actions. While we can’t know the future, we can envision potential futures playing themselves out based on how we act and how we would imagine others to act in response. We can also imagine where we want to go in our lives, in our organizations, and we can develop an ideal vision of the future that can serve as our NorthStar while working out the day-to-day realities that befall us. This is how imagination plays in to the intellectual and moral virtue of prudence, both for individuals and for groups of people. We can only act prudently for our own good when we can imagine what will be good for us.

For this to happen our memories need to be stocked with real-world experiences and surrogate experiences through literature and history. This is why the saying, “Those who don’t know history are doomed to repeat it,” has such cache. But reading itself requires imagination for true understanding. We must actively picture to ourselves what we are reading about. Reading is not a passive experience. And in fact, one of the great strengths of reading over more entertainment-focused media, like the screen, is that the mind must do more work to imagine to itself a vision of the content read. Don’t get me wrong! Children can’t picture to themselves what they’ve never seen. But passive entertainment does not stoke a child’s imagination. Reading aloud is a lost art, and we should help students develop their imagination through lots and lots of practice.

How can we cultivate imagination in our classes and subjects?

Well, we can begin by ruling out some things. We don’t cultivate this active faculty of the imagination through iPads, screens, videos, and edutainment. These are crutches for the imagination. It’s not that children should never experience the delights of video; images delight the mind and can help to stock the memory, but if all their imaginative work is done for students, this will not give them the practice of drawing from their own stock of memory to creatively render ideas to themselves through their imagination. Everything in its place. Our world has no lack of exposure to images by way of screen. So instead, we want to provide for them the vibrant life-giving materials of a Christian and true imagination, and engage the memory, then prompt creative production with true, good and beautiful models. The key here is that students do not have everything handed to them on a silver platter, but just enough to get their minds going. We don’t want to overstimulate. 

So what should we do? Well, parents should provide their children with hours of uninterrupted imaginative play. This provides children with the possibility of imaginative flow. We all know how detailed imagination and creativity take time and thought. If every minute of every day is schedule for children, there is no margin, no open space for this. While much of this applies to parenting and not teaching, schools too should beware of the modern temptation to fill every minute and pack every afternoon and evening with sports and extracurriculars. We have a tendency as a culture to believe that more is always better. Chris Perrin of Classical Academic Press has been keen to remind us that the origin of the word ‘school’ is the Greek word ‘schole’ which meant leisure. Often we are going at anything but a leisurely pace at school, and this has negative ramifications for children’s imagination. 

At the same time, this fact about imagination helps be on our guard against some modern ideology around attention span. When pundits claim that a child of a particular age only has a 10 minute or 15 minute attention span, we should be incredibly skeptical. That same child could be glued to the TV for hours on end, exercising perfect attention. Or that child could spend hours at the craft table with crayons and scissors and nothing but his vivid imagination. And yes, the child might struggle to attend to a new and abstract concept in math for which he has not been given any concrete or pictorial representations. Attention span for children is not a fixed entity. It is possible that if your students are struggling to attend that you have not set up the knowledge in such a way as to engage their imagination. 

How else can we cultivate the imagination? Well, I mentioned reading aloud, and so I would be remiss as the author of A Classical Guide to Narration not to call for the narration of classical literature after one reading aloud. If you didn’t know, narration is a practice where students are asked to tell back in detail after a single reading of some rich text. Instead of summarizing or analyzing, the student who narrates has to imaginatively relive the text as he tells it all back point by point. It’s this imaginative recreation of a story or description or explanation that seals this new knowledge in long term memory and engages the imaginative powers of the student. It will over time help students develop a rich verbal and linguistic imagination. 

In order to help students do this well as part of our lessons we should be sure to prepare them for the rich text that will be the main feature of each new lesson. For example, we can set up the reading by providing them with the right images of real plants, animals, buildings, geography, or items, that are featured in the text. We want them to understand it, and so we should provide them with the vivid images that will make sense of the story or scientific explanation. They will naturally then use those images as they narrate the text in front of the class or to a partner later on. 

Another important way to develop the imagination of our students is through Artwork Study, or Picture Study, Charlotte Mason called it. The idea is to place before students the pictures, paintings and artwork of our greatest artists from down through the ages. Give them a couple of minutes to take it all in quietly. Turn the reproduction over. Then have students recount as many details as they can before discussing it. This does not require special training in art or art history to do. We can stock the memory and learn the language of our great visual artists and in this way develop the visual imagination of our students. I could go on to talk of nature study and natural history outdoors. Learning to name the plants and animals in our own area is a wonderful way to start, as is basic sketching of our findings in a nature journal during our excursions.

Of course, we don’t want to leave out geometry and spatial reasoning, as if there were not an imagination proper to mathematics. This calls for a slow, deliberate movement from concrete to pictorial to abstract. In other words, whatever curriculum we use we should be sure as teachers to provide the imagination with the raw materials it needs in the proper order or sequence. Artistry in any area requires a detailed vision of what could be. We want to help students gain the developed imagination of design thinking and engineering. This may in fact be why we value manipulatives and scientific experiments, because they help lead to a mathematical and scientific imagination.

A Christian Classical Imagination

All this seems to follow from the fact that the imaginative faculty is responsible for bringing new images to our minds from the storehouse of our memory. Integration and synthesis are the acts of the creative imagination. This imagination is a far-reaching master faculty of the mind, and we would do well to recognize how crucial it is to cultivate it in school.

So I conclude that a Christian imagination and a well-informed classical imagination, trained in the liberal arts and sciences, fed on the Great Books and Great Conversation, full of true, good and noble ideas, is a if not the major outcome that we are seeking in our sort of education. We want our students to be imaginative in this sense.

In Mere Christianity C.S. Lewis wrote something striking about what it means to be original that has stayed with me. He said,

“Even in literature and art, no man who bothers about originality will ever be original: whereas if you simply try to tell the truth (without caring twopence how often it has been told before) you will, nine times out of ten, become original without ever having noticed it.”

I think that what Lewis said of originality applies to how we think about cultivating the imagination in school. Imaginative expressions should aim at truth-telling. The best developed imagination, originality itself, actually comes from submission to the truths of the Great Tradition, of Christianity first and foremost, but also the best that has been thought, said, written, painted, composed, experimented before us. 

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This series may not be able to answer all the controversies and complex intricacies of this age old set of questions, but at least if we follow out these different strands, we might be able to be more aware of our preconceived notions and how they are affecting our view of the children in front of us day after day. Even as Christians we can tend to hold contradictory notions at one and the same time and this befuddles our practices and responses to everyday occurrences. Once we follow the ghost of the soul out into the courtyard of ideas, we’ll find both valuable insights into who we are and how we should be educated, but also incorrect notions that should be discarded and reburied as liable to lead us astray. In this way we can end the haunting of our educational practices by false views and unhelpful practices.

We can profitably begin with Plato’s account of the soul as immortal and containing three parts which must be properly harmonized with one another through education. Before Plato significant thinking about the nature of the soul had already begun among earlier Greek philosophers, but no one thinker arguably has had a greater influence on Western conceptions of the soul than him. 

The Immortality of the Soul

In Homeric times the word for soul, psyche in Greek, had more of a straightforward referent, something akin to ‘life’ on the one hand, and ‘shade’ or ‘ghost’ on the other: 

The soul is, on the one hand, something that a human being risks in battle and loses in death. On the other hand, it is what at the time of death departs from the person’s limbs and travels to the underworld, where it has a more or less pitiful afterlife as a shade or image of the deceased person.

See Ancient Theories of Soul (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy/Summer 2009 Edition)

This set of meanings is roughly comparable to the common use of ‘nephesh’ in the Hebrew Old Testament, which may have originally meant ‘neck’ or ‘throat’. Your soul in this ancient Greek or Hebrew context is what makes you alive, and perhaps, ironically, the part of you that lingers on in Hades or Sheol after you have died. 

Plato develops especially on this second meaning in the Phaedo to express his view that the human soul is immortal. For Plato this immortal soul is embodied throughout a human life and can be affected negatively by the choices and lifestyle lived in the body. Purifying the soul from bodily entanglements is part and parcel of the true practice of philosophy, which involves a type of dying that leads to genuinely blessed life. 

This Platonic view of the soul will influence Stoicism, as well as later Gnosticism. Moreover, it seems almost impossible not to conclude that Jesus and the apostles are not, in some ways, both countering and affirming it, as earlier Jews had before them. For instance, Jesus says, “And do not fear those who kill the body but cannot kill the soul. Rather fear him who can destroy both soul and body in hell” (Matt 10:28 ESV). This seems to agree with the idea that the soul outlives physical death, adding further the Christian view of final judgment and everlasting “destruction” in hell. 

At the same time, we do not have any Christian affirmation of the idea that the soul pre-exists bodily life in normal humans. Therefore, Plato’s supposition that all learning is in fact remembering finds no support in Christian theology. It also brings with it its own set of problems, like the possible infinite regression of souls passing into and out of bodies. Plato’s socratic method of educating by ‘drawing out’ the knowledge already nascent inside the soul must find some other justification than this theory of the soul for classical Christian educators. 

But we have had no trouble doing so, since asking the student questions to prod thought is attested elsewhere, not least with Jesus himself. In addition, the value of socratic or maieutic instruction is found in training a student in the art of dialectical reasoning and, at the same time, forcing a student to analyze their own partially formed or borrowed answers to life’s fundamental questions for logical consistency. This process can help bring about a metanoia, a repentance or change of mind, where a student adopts a more consistent understanding of the world. We can safely do away with pre-existence while holding onto the human soul’s continued existence after death based on the biblical support.

The Tripartite Soul: Rational, Emotional, and Appetitive

In Plato’s Republic his tripartite theory of the soul finds its most stunning and educationally suggestive descriptions. The overarching concern of the dialogue is the attempt by Socrates to explain what justice is and why it is worthwhile in and of itself, regardless of society’s rewards. The tale of the ring of Gyges told in book 2 helps to bring the issue to a head by positing a scenario in which a man with a ring of invisibility could practice all manner of injustice without any fear of punishment. It is a case of absolute power corrupting absolutely and challenging the hearer on whether he wouldn’t do the same thing, if given the opportunity. 

Socrates’ extended answer to the question of whether justice truly leads to happiness or blessedness hinges on the order or disorder of the several parts of the soul. He maintains that the tyrant with absolute power is actually the most miserable and unhappy type of person. In order to explain why he writs large the nature of the soul, by expanding into an inquiry into the just city-state, which ends up having the same harmonious parts as the individual human soul.  “Corresponding to the three types in the city, the soul also is tripartite,” says Socrates (Perseus Digital Library, Book 9, 580d). “Each of us also in whom the several parts within him perform each their own task—he will be a just man and one who minds his own affair” (441d-e).

The three parts are the rational, high-spirited, or we might say emotional, and the appetitive. The symbolic images he assigns to these are a man (rational), a lion (spirited), and a monkey or monster (appetitive). “Does it not belong to the rational part to rule, being wise and exercising forethought in behalf of the entire soul, and to the principle of high spirit to be subject to this and its ally?” (441e) asks Socrates. These two parts, then, allied together, can effectively “preside over the appetitive part which is the mass of the soul in each of us and the most insatiate by nature of wealth” (442a). In Plato all the non-ideal forms of government, as well as the non-ideal forms of individual character, are explained through various types of disordering of these fundamental parts of the soul or city. 

We can pause at this point to note that Plato’s tripartite soul draws from our common sense self-awareness as human beings. Each of us has felt within 1) the massive force of appetitive desires, 2) the high emotional spirits of a desire for honor and the motivation to act, 3) the ability to think rationally about things, whether our own affairs or abstract sciences. Naming these various parts of the human inner life does not exactly put us in heavily speculative or theoretical territory, unlike the soul’s pre-existence. Whether we think of Freud’s superego, ego and id, or the biblical language of mind, heart and flesh or passions, we find ourselves assuming something very like the threefold division of Plato. In other words, Plato’s tripartite soul is fundamental and necessary, virtually uncontestable (unless we get down very deep in the weeds of exact distinctions), and therefore incredibly important and valuable.

Plato has posed the question of human justice or righteousness as a matter of a rightly ordered soul in harmony with itself. In doing so he framed the work of education and personal growth as aiming principally at what came to be called the cardinal virtues: practical wisdom or prudence, courage, temperance and justice. Practical wisdom arises when the rational part of the soul rules and is obeyed in a person’s choices. Courage involves the high-spirited part’s emotional regulation according to right reason, even in the face of fears. Temperance, or self-control, comes about when the mass of desires and appetites submit to the rational and spirited part, with the outcome of these three being a person who acts justly toward himself and others. 

How does this educational goal come about? we might ask. What pedagogy or means can be turned to this end or purpose of education? Plato’s answer is that it is “the blending of music and gymnastics that will render them concordant, intensifying and fostering the one with fair words and teachings and relaxing and soothing and making gentle the other by harmony and rhythm” (441e-442a). A literary, poetic, and musical education filled with examples of real goodness, truth and beauty (we must engage in some censoring of the poets, Plato asserts) will tune the heart to right reason. Physical training to endure pains and sufferings, improve fitness and build up well-trained reflexes of nerve and sinew, rather than pampering the flesh, will set the appetitive part in submission. (For more on gymnastic and musical education, see Clark and Jain’s The Liberal Arts Tradition.)

Based on his symbolic and tripartite image of the soul, the task of education becomes very clear, aiming both at justice and ultimate happiness or human flourishing as two sides of the same coin:

And on the other hand he who says that justice is the more profitable affirms that all our actions and words should tend to give the man within us complete domination over the entire man and make him take charge of the many-headed beast—like a farmer who cherishes and trains the cultivated plants but checks the growth of the wild—and he will make an ally of the lion’s nature, and caring for all the beasts alike will first make them friendly to one another and to himself, and so foster their growth. (589a-b)

This type of self-culture implies the help of a certain type of parental discipline and educational regimen that might be otherwise unwelcome. The conclusion is that each soul has a “many-headed beast” within it that must be taken charge of, checked, and dominated. The heart and sense of honor and motivation must be made an ally to the reason, “cultivated plants” like good habits and right emotional responses must be “cherished” but wild growths must be pruned, weeds dug up by the roots. 

Moreover, the three parts of the soul have each, according to Plato, a different set of natural desires. The rational part is a lover of learning and a lover of wisdom, the natural philosopher in us. The spirited part is a lover of honor; we might call this our social-emotional nature, easily swayed by the wrong influences, but a powerhouse of energy and drive. The appetitive part is a lover of gain, money or profit, chiefly concerned with how to satisfy its own desires. According to this insight, then, the major concern of education is not simply how to train the skills of one individual part of the soul, i.e. honing the faculties of the rational part. For, if the appetitive part or spirited part are ruling the man, then the powers of the rational part of the soul can themselves be used in service of the man’s avarice and unchecked ambition. Instead, the challenge of education and self-culture is how to properly order the development and growth of the three parts of the soul in harmonious and proper relationships with one another. Each part must do its own proper task, claims Plato. 

To the extent that Plato is right about this, modern education is found to be wanting because of its abandonment of traditional values and morality. Without an agreed upon principle for the ordering of the soul’s affections, as C.S. Lewis explained in The Abolition of Man, education will tend to be disforming, making bloated heads and shriveled chests, or we might say, unrighteous men, enslaved to their own prejudices and appetites. This much we have said before on Educational Renaissance, but perhaps now we can see more clearly how it is this tripartite view of the soul that hovers over this educational problem. As we continue our series on The Soul of Education we will see how this fundamental insight from Plato finds expression or contradiction in various ways.

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This is why it has been so crucial for classical Christian educators to return to foundational questions. The average parent or teacher in our movement may tire of such stargazing, but it is necessary. The means that we use to educate young human beings must be consistent with the end or purpose of education. 

But the purpose of education itself and the means we use to educate must also be consistent with our answer to the even larger question of what a human being is. Most of our practical disagreements in how to educate children have these fundamental worldview questions hovering in the background, like a ghost that will continually haunt us if we do not acknowledge its presence. 

To picture worldview commitments as star-gazing or a set of higher level propositions, at the top of a chain of deductions written out on a whiteboard somewhere, tricks us into thinking that we can assume them and get on with application. But this is untrue. The soul of education must enliven our work with children and be embodied in our curriculum, pedagogy and classroom leadership moment by moment, otherwise we will repeat the errors of competing worldviews and beliefs, half-truths and downright falsehoods.

The soul of education is therefore found in our view of the soul. Charlotte Mason’s philosophy of education is a notable example of this recognition. She grounded her educational ideas on the fundamental claim that children were persons. “I believe that the first article of a valid educational creed–’Children are born persons’–is of a revolutionary character; for what is a revolution but a complete reversal of attitude?” (The Parents’ Review 22; June 1911, 419-437). Our attitude toward children will inevitably shape our work as educators in ways that are beyond our immediate awareness. Classical Christian educators advocate a similar reversal of attitude or revolution in education.

We may not think of the word ‘person’ as carrying the same theological or philosophical weight as the word ‘soul’. But Charlotte Mason draws our attention to our modern assumptions about the nature of human beings through this word. Today even as classical Christian educators, we are stymied by a mishmash of terms for the nature of human beings: from traditional and religious terms like ‘soul’ and ‘spirit’, to the language of modern psychology and neuroscience. How do we make sense of it all? And how are these terms and our half-formed understanding of them implicitly shaping our attitude toward the children we educate? 

I have heard one of the leaders in our movement meaningfully claim that in education we are “nourishing souls,” rather than any number of alternatives. At the time there was a collective sigh in the room as we felt at a visceral level the weight of this re-imagination of education. But why? What does the word ‘soul’ even mean? And how can it be more than the ghost of our traditional imagination in a world where human beings are conceived in terms of their amygdala, frontal lobes, and dopaminergic system?

As Christians committed to the language of scripture regarding our flesh, soul, mind and spirit, how can we sift through the varying conceptions of the human person for the fundamental insights that can create a Christian revolution of attitude and methods in our educational endeavors? 

In this series of short articles on the soul of education, I propose to evaluate ancient and modern theories of the soul, from Plato and Aristotle to modern psychology and neuroscience, in order to glean important and revolutionary insights for our day-to-day educational practices. The ghost of these various conceptions of the soul are haunting our schools and classrooms. Like the Stoic Athenodorus we have to keep our heads about us, follow the ghost out into the courtyard of ideas, and learn its story by digging in the spot where it left, if we would no longer be haunted (see Pliny the Younger’s Letter to Sura). In our next article we will begin this process with Plato’s tripartite soul and its implications for education. 

I hope you enjoy this series of short articles as I take a break from my series of articles on Aristotle’s intellectual virtues. The Soul of Education is tangentially related to that extended exploration and will provide me with some needed time to wrap up book editing and writing projects, as well as research for the next series on Aristotle’s intellectual virtue of intuition or understanding (nous). Share a comment or thought on how you think any of the competing theories of the soul might be affecting our attitude and methods in education!

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We must aim at graduating practically wise young men and women, if we are to restore the moral, intellectual and spiritual virtues as the proper ends or goals of education. Instead of limiting education to Bloom’s taxonomy of cognitive domain objectives, we should embrace a baptized prudence.

Aristotle’s prudence has its limits, however, as well as its transcendence. Like artistry, prudence itself is not enough for the Christian educator, but it can participate in or integrate with the other goals of education. In this article we will attempt to map out those limits of prudence and also address the possibilities of prudence for transcending into higher realities. To continue our metaphor of the head, heart and hands from earlier in this series, we have noted that the artistry of the hands is not enough, but we must enter into the deeper realms of the heart (i.e. prudence); in a similar fashion, the heart itself will, on its own, come up short. After all, “the heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately sick,” according to Jeremiah (17:6 ESV). 

The Limits of Perfect Prudence and Self-Interest

This Christian view of the heart’s deceitfulness is not simply a commentary on how hard it is for a person to develop genuine prudence, the equivalent of an Aristotelian claim for its rarity, “A man of practical wisdom, who can find?” Instead, it speaks to the thoroughgoing corruption of human prudence itself. Let me explain what I mean. Given Aristotle’s analysis, prudence consists of fear and hope undergirded by natural self-love. Definitionally prudence aims at my own personal human happiness. Since that requires good friends in a polis or city-state involving specialization to provide the good things of life, as well as the public justice of reciprocity and law-abiding citizens, then my own interest coincides with the manifestation of the moral virtues. 

However, Aristotle does not sufficiently address the question posed by the biblical book of Job, why good conduct should remain prudent if it no longer leads to personal eudaimonia. The Satanic claim in the book of Job is that a prudent form of righteousness devolves ultimately into mere self-interest, and when tested it amounts to no more than punishable wickedness. In fact, dependent as it is on an accurate assessment of the particular realities of human life, Aristotelian prudence operates within an immanent frame of reference, rather than a transcendent one, to use the terms of Charles Taylor (see A Secular Age). 

While Aristotle maintains an under-the-sun perspective on the correspondence between righteousness and earthly reward, the book of Job unveils a transcendent perspective held roughly in common with Plato, Aristotle’s predecessor, who likely struggled with the injustice of Socrates’ execution in a way that Aristotle did not. While the issue addressed by Plato’s Republic was first and foremost justice rather than practical wisdom, the character of Socrates at least took up the extreme objection of the ring of Gyges. Injustice becomes more prudent than justice if a man has the capability of getting away with it, pictured well by a ring of invisibility. Absolute power, and with it absolute prudence, corrupts absolutely. And on the other hand, when given the appearance of injustice, “the just man will have to endure the lash, the rack, chains, [362a] the branding-iron in his eyes, and finally, after every extremity of suffering, he will be crucified, and so will learn his lesson that not to be but to seem just is what we ought to desire” (361e-362a). 

Christians have seen in this passage of Plato a proto-evangelion to the Greeks; in addition to the verbal and situational similarity to the passion of the Christ, even more impressive might be its intended effect: to chasten the limits of a worldly Greek wisdom. As the apostle to the Gentiles would put it about four centuries later, “So then Jews ask for signs and Greeks seek wisdom, but we preach a crucified Messiah, a stumbling block to Jews and foolishness to gentiles” (1 Cor 1:22-23, orig. trans.). Why is such a proclamation foolish? Because who would follow a leader so lacking in practical and political wisdom, that he would end up a public failure, executed as a lowly criminal! Plato’s mysterious and extended discourse in the Republic is intended to provide a mystical as well as rational answer to the dilemma of righteousness and self-interest. The answer ultimately becomes dependent on mythical tales of the afterlife and revelatory accounts of the soul like the myth of Er. In this way, Plato’s wisdom embraces a transcendence similar to Christianity but which is lacking in Aristotle. 

Aristotle’s definitional argument against this involves the claim that it is mere cleverness, and not practical wisdom which can manipulate ends in a morally neutral or corrupt manner. Prudence itself caps all the virtues and makes them true or genuine: “Therefore, as in the part of us which forms opinions there are two types, cleverness and practical wisdom, so too in the moral part there are two types, natural virtue and virtue in the strict sense, and of these the latter involves practical wisdom” (VI.13). Not even natural virtues, or mere propensities towards the right way of living or doing something qualify, but only the wholeness of the moral excellences governed by reasoned practical wisdom: “It is clear, then, from what has been said, that it is not possible to be good in the strict sense without practical wisdom, nor practically wise without moral virtue.”

In one sense, we could rightly criticize Aristotle for cooking the books here. If the definition of the correct mark for any of the moral virtues amounts to what the prudent man would choose, how do we actually know the difference between cleverness and practical wisdom, since the clever man might suppose himself to be practicing all the virtues? And we, lacking in full prudence, have little basis on which to judge the clever man for his Machiavellian prudence and political artistry. Aristotle does not give us hope of a transcendent frame of reference from which to call into question the machinations of our prudential self-interest. We have entered a circularity of reasoning; he may in fact describe the truth of the matter, but that does not enable a corrupt human person to actually enter into the loop of perfect virtue, governed by practical wisdom.

The Limitations of Human Calculation and Control

Aristotle would likely object to this challenge by stating that we are looking for the wrong sort of precision in his ethics, when we aim at a circular perfection of virtues (see Nic. Ethics I.3). The point is to give us enough of a sense to be getting on with as we take aim at various human goods. Life isn’t perfect, choices are complex, and chance or luck must be given its due in human affairs. In this way, Aristotle would prefer to emphasize a different limit of prudence, not the dilemma of self-interest, but the limitations of human calculation and control in a complex universe.

According to Herodotus, the wise man Solon famously questioned King Croessus’ claim on happiness, given that the gods are temperamental and a man’s fortune’s can quickly turn from better to worse or vice versa. In book I ch. 10 of the Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle acknowledges the role of chance in contributing to happiness. While he ultimately disagrees with the conclusion of Solon, that we should only pronounce happiness upon an individual when we’ve seen the end of their life, nevertheless he acknowledges the limits of control available to the prudent individual:

Now many events happen by chance, and events different in importance; small pieces of good fortune or of its opposite clearly do not weigh down the scales of life one way or the other, but a multitude of great events if they turn out well will make life more blessed (for not only are they themselves such as to add beauty to life, but the way a man deals with them may be noble and good), while if they turn out ill they crush and maim blessedness; for they both bring pain with them and hinder many activities. Yet even in these nobility shines through, when a man bears with resignation many great misfortunes, not through insensibility to pain but through nobility and greatness of soul. (Rev. Oxford Trans., 1739)

Aristotle’s ultimate conclusion is still that moral and intellectual excellences, as activities, have a staying power in human life that mostly overcomes the changes and chances of fortune. Excellent activities “are more durable because those who are blessed spend their life most readily and most continuously in these,” and therefore the happy man “will be happy throughout his life,” for “he will bear the chances of life most nobly and altogether decorously” (1739). 

We can note that Aristotle’s philosophy does leave room for the fact that even the most perfect prudence does not have all resources available to turn all events to its own good. In fact, we might even say that there is nothing to prevent prudence itself from leading to catastrophic failure. You could make the absolute best decisions with the knowledge available to you and still be undone by circumstances. Aristotle had a proper appreciation for the nature of tragedy; sometimes in this world the great-souled individual can meet with extreme hardship. In such cases, we would do better to appreciate the limits of practical wisdom to bring about human blessings, rather than throw up our hands at the value of prudence at all. In a way, Aristotle anticipates a Stoic “resignation” in the passage quoted above. Epictetus famously taught his disciples that, when kissing their child goodnight, they should call to mind the fact that the one they love is mortal and could die tomorrow. Far from the coldness that Stoics are criticized for, such reflections as “memento mori” (“Remember that you will die”) should increase gratitude and an emotional tenderness, alongside the nobility and decorousness that Aristotle has named. 

Christian Suffering and Purified Prudence

Christians, likewise, endorse a submission to providence that chastens and humbles those proud of their own prudential reasoning. Job’s response to his third grand misfortune stands as a model for Christian suffering: “Then Job arose and tore his robe and shaved his head and fell on the ground and worshiped. And he said, ‘Naked I came from my mother’s womb, and naked shall I return. The Lord gave, and the Lord has taken away; blessed be the name of the Lord’” (Job 1:20-21 ESV). The audience understands from the transcendent visions of the heavenly court that Job’s suffering comes because of a cosmic test posed by the adversary, but Job himself is left none the wiser for why his wise and righteous life has fallen short of its natural reward. Nevertheless, his worshipful submission to a hard providence is genuine and complete, even if he ends up answering the accusations of his “friends” by challenging the justice of God. Job is never given an answer, and so the implicit conclusion of the book is that the faithful must embrace righteous suffering regardless of prudential reward.

We have already had occasion to reference Jesus’ endorsement of a baptized prudence, “Be wise [phronemoi] as serpents but innocent as doves” (Matt 10:16b). But the context is instructive for the current topic. Christian prudence must uniquely transcend self-interest in a world that is in violent opposition to the gospel. The chapter begins with the twelve apostles’ particular mission to cast out demons, heal the sick and proclaim the kingdom of God, but the nature of Jesus’ instructions in the chapter seems intended to characterize the Christian mission throughout the church age. Jesus endorses a unique sort of anti-prudence in terms of the disciples’ preparation for the journey: “Acquire no gold or silver or copper for your belts, no bag for your journey, or two tunics or sandals or a staff, for the laborer deserves his food” (Matt 10:9-10). 

The disciples are sent out “as sheep in the midst of wolves” (10:16a), innocent victims intentionally led forth to be falsely accused, flogged, dragged before authorities, hated by all and delivered over to death. Jesus is going to put the dilemma of Plato’s Republic and Job on display on a grand scale with the Christian apostles and martyrs. As the apostle Paul explains, “For I think that God has exhibited us apostles as men sentenced to death, for we have become a spectacle to the cosmos, both to angels and men” (1 Cor 4:9). Christian prudence is transformed by faith and hope to be “sorrowful yet always rejoicing” (2 Cor 6:10). Christian students become like the teacher Jesus, who is hated and persecuted by the world (Matt 10:24-25). In so doing they deliberately choose to accept less than earthly happiness for the sake of transcendent happiness. They are commanded, “Deliberate about [phroneite] the things above, not earthly things. For you have died and your life is hidden with Christ in God” (Col 3:2; orig. trans.). They fear the God who controls eternal destinies over human authorities and worldly rewards (see Matt 10:26-33). This wisdom is the substance of faith itself, which sees the unseen, and it effects a remarkable transformation on the nature of prudence.

Christian prudence is, at the end of the day, so remarkable that it hardly looks like prudence at all, when gazed on from this angle. And yet there is a sort of rational calculation to it. The introduction of eternal judgment, and therefore the heightened stakes of an eternal weight of glory or misery, radically upends the rational calculation of human goods. This enlightened prudence dictates not only the outcome of Pascal’s wager (Belief in God is the only rationally self-interested course of action, given the possibilities of heaven and hell.), but also a life of radical self-sacrifice. The pearl of great price of eternal happiness claims from us any cost, any sacrifice in earthly goods. As Jim Elliott, the martyred Christian missionary to Quechua Indians of Ecuador, famously wrote in his journal on Oct 28, 1949: “He is no fool who gives what he cannot keep to gain that which he cannot lose.” 

Christianity thus resolved the corruption of self-interested prudence through the call to take up our individual cross and follow Christ, through personal suffering to infinite joy beyond. In this context the golden rule to do unto others as we would have them do unto us can actually find fulfillment, because a dove-like hope has quieted the serpent of self-interest. Prudence is transcended but it remains even while swallowed up in faith, hope, and love. After all, the “unblushing promises of reward” in the New Testament (to quote Lewis’ “Weight of Glory”) prevent us from claiming unselfishness as a virtue in itself. The fear and hope inbred through natural self-love are not abandoned but grow up into full manhood, as it were. Christians do not throw out prudence entirely, but embrace a baptized and purified prudence of faith, hope and love.

“The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom” (Prov 9:10), but in the transformation of wisdom into perfect love, fear becomes faith and only prudential love remains (see 1 John 4:17-18). As St. Paul concludes,

Love never ends. As for prophecies, they will pass away; as for tongues, they will cease; as for knowledge, it will pass away. For we know in part and we prophesy in part, but when the perfect comes, the partial will pass away. When I was a child, I spoke like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child. When I became a man, I gave up childish ways. For now we see in a mirror dimly, but then face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall know fully, even as I have been fully known. (1 Cor. 13:8-12)

The Christian, then, cannot agree with Aristotle that the philosophic wisdom or sophia characterized by knowledge and comprehension is the highest intellectual virtue. For him, the Unmoved Mover sits in pure deistic contemplation and therefore non-acting philosophic wisdom is crowned king of the intellectual virtues. The Christian worships a God whose steadfast love endures forever, who in His very being is love, who is Eternal Act. And so, not only is our partial knowledge dwarfed by his perfect perception of all things, knowledge itself passes away in prudential love, as we come face to face with the living, acting God. 

Prudence and the Other Intellectual Virtues

Of course, such theological reflections do not negate the way in which intuition, scientific knowledge and philosophic wisdom properly transcend practical wisdom. We are simply acknowledging that the theological virtues of faith, hope and love uniquely draw up the life of prudence into themselves, and in this way lead prudence beyond and above the intellectual virtues of the head. The heart transcends the head in the realm of the spirit. But it is not less true to remark on the ways that the head stands above the heart. The classical educational endeavor itself requires this. Have I not before remarked on the joy of learning for its own sake? 

The utilitarian and practical perspective on schooling and learning tends toward a reductionism that views knowledge simply as power. Prudential learning looks to advantage and endeavors to provide for earthly needs by a course of schooling that will lead to a good job with a good salary. But in the actual course of learning, new loves and affections are found. The beauty of education is that often a study begun for some advantage becomes an end in itself. There is a higher nobility found in the disinterested enjoyment of knowledge for its own sake, and, whatever our theological comments may have seemed to indicate before, this too is a form of love. The love of learning and the love of reality for itself and not merely as a means is part and parcel of full intellectual virtue. This limit and transcendence of practical wisdom occurs naturally and is not a rare mystery beyond our normal experience. Observation and calculation, with a view to the self, almost of its own accord will move a person towards a real encounter with the other as an end in itself. 

Such an experience of prudence transcending into disinterested intuition, knowledge and wisdom is almost proverbial. From thinking of ourselves we become lost in contemplation of curious mysteries. The boy who has gone to collect firewood stops to look at a piece of wood and is mesmerized by the moss growing on it, then the insects crawling about, and his practical task forgotten, he freely spends precious minutes indulging his curiosity. This too is part of a full life engaged in the good things of the created order God has made. And so, we must progress still further up and further in, to account for the full beauty and flowering of human intellectuality. The life of the mind has its own rewards. To these we must turn next in our series on Aristotle’s intellectual virtues.

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