The recent controversy stirred up by Nancy Pelosi’s remarks on Meet the Press (August 24) that St. Augustine of Hippo (b. 354) would have permitted abortion up to three months has highlighted once again the necessity for citizens of a republic to have a working knowledge of primary sources and where to find them.
Tracking down the comments of Augustine (late fourth and early fifth century) and of Aquinas (thirteenth century) on the Internet is not an easy task, but it is important to realize that both of them were actually summarizing Aristotle’s theory about “ensoulment,” that is, the point of time in which the body joins the soul, which they tied to the appearance of fetal genitalia, perhaps because the ancients regarded the fetus at this stage to have the appearance of a human being.
Determining the moment of ensoulment is not the same as determining when life itself begins, so bringing ensoulment into a debate about abortion in postmodern America seems really to introduce a red herring into the argument. Moreover, if Senator Pelosi desires to rest her case on the ensoulment issue (90 days after conception as the outermost point), that certainly does not explain her voting record, which shows that Pelosi has even supported partial-birth abortion at full term.
Of interest on the Internet is an article entitled “Aquinas on Human Ensoulment, Abortion and the Value of Life” by John Haldane and Patrick Lee, which can be found at www2.franciscan.edu/plee/aquinas_on_human_ensoulment.htm. This article is a refutation of the views expressed by Robert Pasnau in his book Aquinas and Human Nature. Haldane and Lee do a good job of supporting their claims with quotations from Aquinas and references to where they can be found in the Summa Theologiae.
Also of interest is Chapter 17 in a work of Augustine entitled Marriage and Concupiscence, Book I, entitled “What is Sinless in the Use of Matrimony? What is Attended With Venial Sin, and What with Mortal?” Here Augustine makes clear his abhorrence of abortion in the context of his remarks concerning abortion of children conceived inside of marriage. Notably, he uses the term “cruel lust” to sum up his opinion of the practice. This writing can be found online at www.newadvent.org/fathers/15071.htm .
Tuesday, August 26, 2008
Tuesday, August 19, 2008
Augustine's Mom Trumps Plato
"I cannot talk to Augustine, for he is dead. Yet I can connect with him and even walk around a bit in his skin since my mind was trained in the same way his was and my mental adventures are much like his."
This, I hope, will be the conclusion of my students, who, receiving a classical education in the heart of America, will understand exactly what the great man meant when he opined about the struggles he had learning Greek.
The difficulty of mastering a foreign language, wrote Augustine, "was like bitter gall sprinkled over all the sweetness of Greek stories and fables" (Confessions of St. Augustine). It's comforting to know that even the greatest of the ancients struggled with his homework as a boy.
He speaks of Homer, Terence, Vergil, and Cicero--men whose works have become familiar to these classical students as well.
He speaks of "learning the beginnings of literature and rhetoric" in Madaura, of being a senior student at the School of Rhetoric in Carthage, of later teaching the art of rhetoric in Tagaste (his hometown)--features of adolescent education and its first fruits that resonate with the student.
He expresses admiration for the Syrian, Hiereus, who was a master of Greek oratory and of Latin, a sort of fellow in the international fraternity of the classics, a fraternity which begins to tug at the heart and mind of the student.
Augustine then turns toward the chronology of his eventual encounter with Christ. He explains how, though the works of the philosophers made more sense to him than those "interminable fantasies of the Manichees," Aristotle's Ten Categories could not save him from his sin.
He avers that at Carthage he "had begun to be disturbed by listening to a man called Elpidus who spoke and argued openly against the Manichees and produced evidence from the Scripture which was not easy to resist." His classical training in logic finds its match in the mind of the God of his mother. Can it be?
He goes on to tell that, being called from Rome to Milan as a professor of rhetoric, he came into contact with Bishop Ambrose of Milan, who "had a worldwide reputation" as a classical scholar yet was a servant of Christ. Wheels begin to turn in the the midwesterner's mind.
But, most importantly, Augustine ticks off the many ways in which the teachings of the Platonists came nothing near the monumental truth that "the soul of man, though it bears witness to the light, yet itself is not that light."
The great works of Greek and Latin, of rhetoric and literature, of Manichee and Platonist come nothing near the profound teaching of the Hebrews and the one who had "called the Gentiles into [God's] inheritance."
As students steeped in the same classical tradition as Augustine, classical students in a Christian milieu find that their own life experiences blend almost entirely with those of a kid who lived, was educated, and flourished in the late fourth century.
It authenticates their own journey as they realize they are on the same path that the ancient scholar trod.
And it encourages the Christian mother who stands unmoved as her son, once blown about by every wind of doctrine, finds that the greatest treasure of the philosopher's heart is trumped by the treasure in the heart of his mom. It is a joy like no other. It is the fruit of the classical Christian school.
This, I hope, will be the conclusion of my students, who, receiving a classical education in the heart of America, will understand exactly what the great man meant when he opined about the struggles he had learning Greek.
The difficulty of mastering a foreign language, wrote Augustine, "was like bitter gall sprinkled over all the sweetness of Greek stories and fables" (Confessions of St. Augustine). It's comforting to know that even the greatest of the ancients struggled with his homework as a boy.
He speaks of Homer, Terence, Vergil, and Cicero--men whose works have become familiar to these classical students as well.
He speaks of "learning the beginnings of literature and rhetoric" in Madaura, of being a senior student at the School of Rhetoric in Carthage, of later teaching the art of rhetoric in Tagaste (his hometown)--features of adolescent education and its first fruits that resonate with the student.
He expresses admiration for the Syrian, Hiereus, who was a master of Greek oratory and of Latin, a sort of fellow in the international fraternity of the classics, a fraternity which begins to tug at the heart and mind of the student.
Augustine then turns toward the chronology of his eventual encounter with Christ. He explains how, though the works of the philosophers made more sense to him than those "interminable fantasies of the Manichees," Aristotle's Ten Categories could not save him from his sin.
He avers that at Carthage he "had begun to be disturbed by listening to a man called Elpidus who spoke and argued openly against the Manichees and produced evidence from the Scripture which was not easy to resist." His classical training in logic finds its match in the mind of the God of his mother. Can it be?
He goes on to tell that, being called from Rome to Milan as a professor of rhetoric, he came into contact with Bishop Ambrose of Milan, who "had a worldwide reputation" as a classical scholar yet was a servant of Christ. Wheels begin to turn in the the midwesterner's mind.
But, most importantly, Augustine ticks off the many ways in which the teachings of the Platonists came nothing near the monumental truth that "the soul of man, though it bears witness to the light, yet itself is not that light."
The great works of Greek and Latin, of rhetoric and literature, of Manichee and Platonist come nothing near the profound teaching of the Hebrews and the one who had "called the Gentiles into [God's] inheritance."
As students steeped in the same classical tradition as Augustine, classical students in a Christian milieu find that their own life experiences blend almost entirely with those of a kid who lived, was educated, and flourished in the late fourth century.
It authenticates their own journey as they realize they are on the same path that the ancient scholar trod.
And it encourages the Christian mother who stands unmoved as her son, once blown about by every wind of doctrine, finds that the greatest treasure of the philosopher's heart is trumped by the treasure in the heart of his mom. It is a joy like no other. It is the fruit of the classical Christian school.
Monday, August 11, 2008
Why Primary Sources?
One of the frustrations of the Culture War in which we have been engaged in the United States since the 1960s is that publishers of history textbooks have been aggressively re-writing the history of western civilization. Unfortunately, the re-writing of history has had no wholesome precedent. Adolf Hitler, for example, commanded the re-writing of German history to fit with his vision of the destiny of the race, or the volk, as he would have put it. “The history textbook, like everything else in Hitler’s Germany,” writes Gilmer W. Blackburn, “was designed to serve a political end. The selection and arrangement of materials constituted a primary means by which the Nazis inculcated the belief in their own pattern of history” (36). At the other end of the political spectrum, Mao Zedong, Communist dictator in the People’s Republic of China, initiated what he called the Thought Reform Movement in 1950, a movement which required all university educators (and eventually all teachers) to “arm [themselves] with the thought of Marxism-Leninism” and “throw away the vulgar perspectives of individualism and liberalism….” (qtd. in Fu, 276).
Similar efforts in our own time have resulted in an exodus of Christian families from government schools with the concomitant expansion of home schools and private schools. In particular, the rapidly spreading classical modality of education presents a sound response to the issue of propaganda as history: an emphasis on the use of primary sources of history which put students in direct contact with sources that have not been elided, bowdlerized, or totally suppressed.
For the purposes of clarification, a couple of definitions might be in order before going further. The term primary source refers to the actual historical document itself as opposed to a secondary source, which is a book or article about that source. For example, the Declaration of Independence is a primary document of American history. Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong by leftist author James W. Loewen is a secondary source which showcases the author’s personal spin on history. I must hasten to add that not every secondary source in libraries and classrooms across the country is problematic or propagandistic. Most of them are quite good, and it never hurts to take a look at what the “other side” is saying even if it contains a distortion. Nonetheless, primary sources offer great advantages to students and should not be overlooked. Other examples of primary sources would be speeches, letters, papal bulls, government records, autobiographies, eyewitness accounts of historical events, biographies written by an acquaintance of the biographee, and primary works of philosophy or theology which might normally be only excerpted in a high school text. Just a few years ago, it would have been a laborious effort to dig much of this material out in a public library, but with the availability of virtually all historic documents on the Internet nowadays, the sources are literally at one's fingertips.
Other than the obvious motive of resisting propaganda, what are the advantages of primary sources? First and foremost is that reading eyewitness accounts of history is actually pleasurable. I often explain this type of reading to my students as the closest thing they have to a time machine. Reading the actual words Thomas Jefferson wrote in the Declaration of Independence, studying his preliminary drafts and revisions, and digging out comments Jefferson made in his personal correspondence—all these activities create for students the sense that they are sitting in Monticello sipping tea and having conversation with the great man himself.
Secondly, primary sources give students the tools they need to engage the culture regarding current hot-button issues in our country. One example in the post-9/11 world has been the handling of material related to the religion of Islam. In 2002, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, a state-funded university, attempted to require all incoming freshmen to read a book entitled Approaching the Qur’án: The Early Revelation, a collection of excerpts from the Muslim holy book with commentary provided by the translator, Michael Sells. University Chancellor James Moeser defended the decision, saying, “This was a book chosen in the wake of Sept. 11. A fifth of the world’s population subscribes to the Islamic religion and yet it’s not a well-understood religion. This is a great opportunity to have a conversation on the teachings of one of the world’s great religions” (Park). Though the Chancellor’s motives may have been altruistic, critics were not sure why his goal of “having a conversation” did not include requiring incoming Muslim students to read the Bible. Moreover, the problem with this particular translation of the Koran was that it contained, just as the title states, only the “early revelations,” those parts of the Koran that were written, as David Biema noted in Time magazine, “before the Prophet's takeover of the Arabian Peninsula, and so omits lines arguably forged in combat, like 9:5, the Sword Verse: ‘Then, when the sacred months have passed, slay the idolaters wherever ye find them.’ From such verses emerged the Muslim concept of holy war.” In other words, instead of simply requiring the students to purchase a copy of the complete Koran, the university was promoting what many conceived as a bowdlerized version of Muhammad’s teachings which, in effect, censored the very verses that would have helped people understand the motivation and the mindset of the terrorists. In contrast, students who make themselves aware of the complete primary version of a controversial work are in a far better position to engage in debate with those who have a hidden agenda or simply a lack of knowledge about the issue.
Thirdly, working with primary sources helps a student understand the complicated decisions involved in the writing of history, including the challenges that all historians face when deciding which of several accounts of a given historical event is the most reliable. A case in point involves the chronicles that recorded the events of the Wars of the Roses in England. This war, which extended from 1460 to 1485, was a dynastic struggle between two branches of the Plantagenet dynasty: the Lancastrians and the Yorkists. Chroniclers on both sides would write accounts of the various conflicts, manipulating the facts to put their own partisans in the best light possible. One example comes from the arrest and imprisonment of King Henry VI, a Lancastrian, by Edward IV, a Yorkist, an event which led eventually to Henry’s murder. The anonymous author of the Fleetwood manuscript, a Yorkist, clearly states that King Henry was handed over to Edward by the Archbishop of York (Chronicles 60) while John Warkworth, a Lancastrian, recorded that Edward seized and imprisoned both Henry and the Archbishop (Chronicles 123). The former account makes Edward’s action less extreme; the latter, more. Confronted with such divergent accounts, historians—and students reading the primary sources of the historians—must weigh the reliability of each account and look for additional material to corroborate one or the other, a valuable activity which heightens students’ awareness of how historians handle their sources. Such an awareness pays off not only in the study of history, but also in critical analysis of news articles, political debates, and legal arguments concerning the guilt or innocence of a crime suspect.
By reading contradictory accounts of events, students also come to realize the limits even of unbiased eyewitness accounts. In 1995, the University Press of Mississippi published a book entitled We Saw Lincoln Shot: One Hundred Eyewitness Accounts by Timothy S. Good. The accounts are arranged chronologically, beginning with those by persons who were present at Ford’s Theater on the evening of April 14, 1865, and witnessed the assassination of Abraham Lincoln. It concludes with accounts written down as late as 1954. Even among those earliest accounts the details diverge from each other. Most witnesses recalled that, after shooting Lincoln, John Wilkes Booth leaped onto the stage and yelled, “Sic semper tyrannis!” (“Thus always to tyrants!”), but they differed as to whether he yelled it before or after his leap from Lincoln’s box. Similarly, some said Booth limped off the stage, suggesting he broke his leg in his leap; others maintained he ran off the stage, leading to the conclusion that he must have broken his leg elsewhere after his escape. Though it may sound like an unimportant detail, it was nonetheless one that would have mattered very much to Dr. Samuel Mudd, the country doctor who treated Booth’s injury for which he was tried and found guilty of conspiring to assassinate the president. In a court of law today, attorneys for the prosecution and defense would, no doubt, consider the timeline of events key in convicting or acquitting Dr. Mudd. (By the way, he was eventually pardoned in 1869.) As in the case of deliberate distortions, these vague disagreements in the accounts of the assassination lead a student to understand why reputable historians employ tentative language, concluding that an event probably happened, seems likely to have happened, may well have happened, and so on. By becoming familiar with the disparity that can emerge from primary sources, young people are less likely to swallow an author’s interpretation hook, line, and sinker and to judge the acceptability of an account by seeing to what extent the information is presented in absolute or tentative language.
In short, then, much is to be gained from the reading of the primary sources of history. At one and the same time, they are capable of providing students with the facts and revealing the validity of the source—and ultimately the secondary accounts which depend on them. With primary sources, students become empowered to engage the culture, to expose editors who bowdlerize, and to challenge the smug. They also enhance the learning experience by allowing young people simply to enjoy a few hours in their own personal “time machine.” The primary source is a rich resource and worthy of being mined.
References
Blackburn, Gilmer W. Education in the Third Reich: Race and History in Nazi Textbooks. Albany: SUNY, 1985.
Chronicles of the White Rose of York. Reprint ed. Dursley, England: A. J. Sutton, 1974.
Fu, Zhengyuan. Autocratic Tradition and Chinese Politics. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1994. Available online at Google.com Books.www.books.google.com> Accessed 8 Aug. 2008.
Good, Timothy S., ed. We Saw Lincoln Shot: One Hundred Eyewitness Accounts. Jackson: UP of Mississippi, 1995.
Loewen, James W. Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong. New York: Touchstone, 1995.
Park, Michael Y. “University’s Quran Reading Stirs Controversy.” FoxNews.com. <http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,57205,00.html> 8 July 2002. Accessed 8 Aug. 2008.
Sells, Michael. Approaching the Qur’an: The Early Revelations. Ashland, Oregon: White Cloud, 1999.
Van Biema, David. “A Kinder, Gentler Koran.” Time. Online edition. <http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1003050-1,00.html > 19 Aug. 2002. Accessed 8 Aug. 2008.
Similar efforts in our own time have resulted in an exodus of Christian families from government schools with the concomitant expansion of home schools and private schools. In particular, the rapidly spreading classical modality of education presents a sound response to the issue of propaganda as history: an emphasis on the use of primary sources of history which put students in direct contact with sources that have not been elided, bowdlerized, or totally suppressed.
For the purposes of clarification, a couple of definitions might be in order before going further. The term primary source refers to the actual historical document itself as opposed to a secondary source, which is a book or article about that source. For example, the Declaration of Independence is a primary document of American history. Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong by leftist author James W. Loewen is a secondary source which showcases the author’s personal spin on history. I must hasten to add that not every secondary source in libraries and classrooms across the country is problematic or propagandistic. Most of them are quite good, and it never hurts to take a look at what the “other side” is saying even if it contains a distortion. Nonetheless, primary sources offer great advantages to students and should not be overlooked. Other examples of primary sources would be speeches, letters, papal bulls, government records, autobiographies, eyewitness accounts of historical events, biographies written by an acquaintance of the biographee, and primary works of philosophy or theology which might normally be only excerpted in a high school text. Just a few years ago, it would have been a laborious effort to dig much of this material out in a public library, but with the availability of virtually all historic documents on the Internet nowadays, the sources are literally at one's fingertips.
Other than the obvious motive of resisting propaganda, what are the advantages of primary sources? First and foremost is that reading eyewitness accounts of history is actually pleasurable. I often explain this type of reading to my students as the closest thing they have to a time machine. Reading the actual words Thomas Jefferson wrote in the Declaration of Independence, studying his preliminary drafts and revisions, and digging out comments Jefferson made in his personal correspondence—all these activities create for students the sense that they are sitting in Monticello sipping tea and having conversation with the great man himself.
Secondly, primary sources give students the tools they need to engage the culture regarding current hot-button issues in our country. One example in the post-9/11 world has been the handling of material related to the religion of Islam. In 2002, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, a state-funded university, attempted to require all incoming freshmen to read a book entitled Approaching the Qur’án: The Early Revelation, a collection of excerpts from the Muslim holy book with commentary provided by the translator, Michael Sells. University Chancellor James Moeser defended the decision, saying, “This was a book chosen in the wake of Sept. 11. A fifth of the world’s population subscribes to the Islamic religion and yet it’s not a well-understood religion. This is a great opportunity to have a conversation on the teachings of one of the world’s great religions” (Park). Though the Chancellor’s motives may have been altruistic, critics were not sure why his goal of “having a conversation” did not include requiring incoming Muslim students to read the Bible. Moreover, the problem with this particular translation of the Koran was that it contained, just as the title states, only the “early revelations,” those parts of the Koran that were written, as David Biema noted in Time magazine, “before the Prophet's takeover of the Arabian Peninsula, and so omits lines arguably forged in combat, like 9:5, the Sword Verse: ‘Then, when the sacred months have passed, slay the idolaters wherever ye find them.’ From such verses emerged the Muslim concept of holy war.” In other words, instead of simply requiring the students to purchase a copy of the complete Koran, the university was promoting what many conceived as a bowdlerized version of Muhammad’s teachings which, in effect, censored the very verses that would have helped people understand the motivation and the mindset of the terrorists. In contrast, students who make themselves aware of the complete primary version of a controversial work are in a far better position to engage in debate with those who have a hidden agenda or simply a lack of knowledge about the issue.
Thirdly, working with primary sources helps a student understand the complicated decisions involved in the writing of history, including the challenges that all historians face when deciding which of several accounts of a given historical event is the most reliable. A case in point involves the chronicles that recorded the events of the Wars of the Roses in England. This war, which extended from 1460 to 1485, was a dynastic struggle between two branches of the Plantagenet dynasty: the Lancastrians and the Yorkists. Chroniclers on both sides would write accounts of the various conflicts, manipulating the facts to put their own partisans in the best light possible. One example comes from the arrest and imprisonment of King Henry VI, a Lancastrian, by Edward IV, a Yorkist, an event which led eventually to Henry’s murder. The anonymous author of the Fleetwood manuscript, a Yorkist, clearly states that King Henry was handed over to Edward by the Archbishop of York (Chronicles 60) while John Warkworth, a Lancastrian, recorded that Edward seized and imprisoned both Henry and the Archbishop (Chronicles 123). The former account makes Edward’s action less extreme; the latter, more. Confronted with such divergent accounts, historians—and students reading the primary sources of the historians—must weigh the reliability of each account and look for additional material to corroborate one or the other, a valuable activity which heightens students’ awareness of how historians handle their sources. Such an awareness pays off not only in the study of history, but also in critical analysis of news articles, political debates, and legal arguments concerning the guilt or innocence of a crime suspect.
By reading contradictory accounts of events, students also come to realize the limits even of unbiased eyewitness accounts. In 1995, the University Press of Mississippi published a book entitled We Saw Lincoln Shot: One Hundred Eyewitness Accounts by Timothy S. Good. The accounts are arranged chronologically, beginning with those by persons who were present at Ford’s Theater on the evening of April 14, 1865, and witnessed the assassination of Abraham Lincoln. It concludes with accounts written down as late as 1954. Even among those earliest accounts the details diverge from each other. Most witnesses recalled that, after shooting Lincoln, John Wilkes Booth leaped onto the stage and yelled, “Sic semper tyrannis!” (“Thus always to tyrants!”), but they differed as to whether he yelled it before or after his leap from Lincoln’s box. Similarly, some said Booth limped off the stage, suggesting he broke his leg in his leap; others maintained he ran off the stage, leading to the conclusion that he must have broken his leg elsewhere after his escape. Though it may sound like an unimportant detail, it was nonetheless one that would have mattered very much to Dr. Samuel Mudd, the country doctor who treated Booth’s injury for which he was tried and found guilty of conspiring to assassinate the president. In a court of law today, attorneys for the prosecution and defense would, no doubt, consider the timeline of events key in convicting or acquitting Dr. Mudd. (By the way, he was eventually pardoned in 1869.) As in the case of deliberate distortions, these vague disagreements in the accounts of the assassination lead a student to understand why reputable historians employ tentative language, concluding that an event probably happened, seems likely to have happened, may well have happened, and so on. By becoming familiar with the disparity that can emerge from primary sources, young people are less likely to swallow an author’s interpretation hook, line, and sinker and to judge the acceptability of an account by seeing to what extent the information is presented in absolute or tentative language.
In short, then, much is to be gained from the reading of the primary sources of history. At one and the same time, they are capable of providing students with the facts and revealing the validity of the source—and ultimately the secondary accounts which depend on them. With primary sources, students become empowered to engage the culture, to expose editors who bowdlerize, and to challenge the smug. They also enhance the learning experience by allowing young people simply to enjoy a few hours in their own personal “time machine.” The primary source is a rich resource and worthy of being mined.
References
Blackburn, Gilmer W. Education in the Third Reich: Race and History in Nazi Textbooks. Albany: SUNY, 1985.
Chronicles of the White Rose of York. Reprint ed. Dursley, England: A. J. Sutton, 1974.
Fu, Zhengyuan. Autocratic Tradition and Chinese Politics. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1994. Available online at Google.com Books.
Good, Timothy S., ed. We Saw Lincoln Shot: One Hundred Eyewitness Accounts. Jackson: UP of Mississippi, 1995.
Loewen, James W. Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong. New York: Touchstone, 1995.
Park, Michael Y. “University’s Quran Reading Stirs Controversy.” FoxNews.com. <http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,57205,00.html> 8 July 2002. Accessed 8 Aug. 2008.
Sells, Michael. Approaching the Qur’an: The Early Revelations. Ashland, Oregon: White Cloud, 1999.
Van Biema, David. “A Kinder, Gentler Koran.” Time. Online edition. <http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1003050-1,00.html > 19 Aug. 2002. Accessed 8 Aug. 2008.
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