Not long ago an idea hit me for how I want to be remembered. If I decide this is something that should go on my tombstone, I will need to make sure my family knows how to spell it correctly, for it involves a word you don't hear everyday. I would love to be known as a Peripatetic of Light.
It's Not Just For Aristotelians Anymore
If people are familiar at all with the word "peripatetic," they will most likely associate it with Aristotle. As a term related to him, it comes from the Greek word for the walkways of the Lyceum, the school founded by Aristotle. There is also the thought that the word in this context derives from the fact that Aristotle liked to walk around as he talked. As far as that goes, I am a huge believer in walking while thinking and talking, but that is not what led me to this moniker for myself. The word περιπατητικός (peripatētikos) simply means "related to walking around," and this was what caught my eye while reading a passage from the first letter of John.
Plato and Aristotle in Raphael's The School of Athens, 1509-1511
It Has To Do With Jesus
Not long ago I was reading 1 John 1:6-7, which in the English Standard Version reads as follows.
"If we say we have fellowship with him while we walk in the darkness, we lie and do not practice the truth. But if we walk in the light, as he is in the light, we have fellowship with one another, and the blood of Jesus his Son cleanses us from all sin."
Language teachers are forever talking about how the nuances of one language cannot be expressed in another, a point I explored in some depth in the post "Words Matter." This is why Christian teachers and preachers will often refer to the Hebrew or Greek text of a biblical passage, and when I was reading 1 John 1:6-7 in Greek, I was struck by something. Those verses run like this.
The highlighted parts are where John talks about walking in darkness and walking in light, and he uses the verb that literally means "we walk around," περιπατῶμεν (peripatōmen). That's what I want to be. I want to be someone who walks around in the light. By focusing on the literal meaning of the Greek verb, I have an image not just of walking but of doing everything in the light, even when there is darkness around me. I can imagine doing the laundry and making my lunch for work and going to the store while enveloped in a cloud of light. I can see myself in the stygian blackness of the pains that assail us all, yet going through such fearsome darkness cloaked in light. After all, as David says to God in Psalm 139:8 (138:8), "If I make my bed in hell, behold, thou art there." (KJV)
Years ago I taught with Jeannie McNew, who taught English and Theory of Knowledge at our school while also sponsoring Philosophy Club. She was certainly a peripatetic in the Aristotelian sense of the word and shared her great interest in science and philosophy with her students, but she was also what I would call a Peripatetic of Light. As a passionate Catholic, she played flute at her church, and she and her friends recorded an album of worship music, one of the songs of which captures what I'm talking about.
So, there it is. I want to be a Peripatetic of Light because I want to have fellowship with Jesus, and if He is in the light, then that is where I want to be, too.
Let's be honest. Shakespeare died more than four hundred years ago. Is there a place for his work, especially his tragic dramas, either in the drama curriculum of a contemporary high school student or in the entertainment options of the contemporary theatre-goer? The answer is yes, and I was recently reminded of why in the most powerful way.
When Words Carry the Freight
Fear and pity may be aroused by spectacular means; but they may also result from the inner structure of the piece, which is the better way, and indicates a superior poet. For the plot ought to be so constructed that, even without the aid of the eye, he who hears the tale told will thrill with horror and melt to pity at what takes place. But to produce this effect by the mere spectacle is a less artistic method, and dependent on extraneous aids. (Aristotle, Poetics, 1453b, Butcher translation)
When it comes to non-musical theatre, Aristotle suggests that the more powerful play will depend on the words and not the aids of fantastic sets, costumes, or special effects, and that is what I saw in a recent high school production of Macbethby students at The Master's Study.
The set was spare, and the costumes, while perfectly made and fitting, were not so extravagant as to distract. Set changes amounted to nothing more than the occasional moving of a platform on which actors stood, a table, and a few chairs. There was a bit of fog and some simple lighting effects that again enhanced but did not distract from what was of most importance, the words.
The actors' diction and enunciation were clear and powerful, and the choreography of the fight scenes and the scenes with the witches was striking in a way not often found in a high school performance. The audience was drawn deeply into the action, and at many points it was possible to lose sight of the fact that one was watching a play.
Stop Aiming Low
Too often adults think that for education to be engaging for students it must connect immediately with their current lives. True education, however, leads us beyond ourselves, past our our present boundaries, and into that which transcends our circumstances so that we can become better, and a tragedy such as Macbeth does that. The story is larger than that of most of our lives, and because of that we can explore huge themes that we would not ordinarily see. Or to put it another way, we can engage with ideas of power, desire, betrayal, greed, honor, right and wrong, spiritual warfare, and more in the safety of the laboratory that is the theatre. To look at just one of those, it is difficult to think meaningfully about betrayal while being betrayed, but in the two hours of a play in which betrayal is being dramatically depicted, we can consider what it means to betray and be betrayed and, hopefully, grow from the experience.
And if you doubt for one moment that teenagers are capable of memorizing long passages marked by unfamiliar words and archaic syntax, let me assure you that they can, and when they have been taught and directed well, they can bring those passages to life in a way that dissolves the strangeness, allowing the audience to enter another story and another world.
The Entertainment and Edification of Theatre
Watching a play is entertaining, and so is going to a concert or a movie, and that is just fine. We need entertainment. We need to disengage from the pressures of life for a while and merely let ourselves be entertained. There can be another feature to theatre, however, and this is edification, a topic I have written about here. As I wrote in that post, "Edification has to do with the building up of a person. It is soul work. It seeks to help others achieve not merely their own dreams, but to become more than they have ever dreamed possible." Borrowing from Aristotle, this is not achieved best in drama through spectacle, but through the power of words, and there is a reason Shakespeare's works are still being performed more than four centuries after his death. His words are among the best in English at meeting the standard set by Aristotle. His plays, while they can indeed be entertaining, also require something from the audience. They require close listening, a bringing to bear on the story all of our own experiences and knowledge, and a willingness to grow, even through things we may not fully understand.
Tragedy and serious drama have their place in the high school curriculum and in the lives of modern theatre-goers. What is truly tragic is when we sell ourselves short by settling for something less.
Golf is a challenging game, but the perfectly hit shot, one that causes the ball to explode from the sweet spot of the club face, is one of the most satisfying and exhilarating of feelings. No one needs to write one more piece about how challenging teaching is. The internet is filled with such articles. But when everything comes together in a day of stunning academic experience and student ability on display, that needs to be shared and celebrated.
To The Stars Through Antiquity
Apollo 1 Exhibit at Kennedy Space Center
Ad astra per aspera. To the stars through difficulties. The path to the stars has indeed been a difficult and a long one, perhaps longer than many realize, stretching back as it does to the age of classical antiquity. We recently completed a unit in our Latin II classes that saw our high school students reading selections from Plato, Aristotle, and Cicero about space, along with parts of the first science fiction novel, True History, written by Lucian of Samosata in the second century A.D. To get the full story on this unit, which saw students translating and discussing ancient works on outer space, being introduced to ancient technology through the Antikythera Mechanism and ancient mathematics through the calculation of the earth's circumference by Eratosthenes, and exploring the music of the spheres with NASA's discovery of the sound of black holes and the classical music of Gustav Holst, check out our short documentary.
One part of the unit about which I was particularly excited came at the end. After three weeks of deep study in ancient readings on space, our students met a friend of mine via Zoom. Neil Jenkins and I go back to first grade in our friendship, but I did not bring him in for us to discuss our fondness for '80s music and Miami Vice. He holds a Ph.D. in physics from the University of Alabama and is an amateur astrophotographer, although you should not let the title "amateur" mislead you into thinking his work is second rate.
IC 1805 The Heart Nebula in the Constellation Cassiopeia Event Horizon Astrophotography (c) 2021
The Great Orion Nebula M42 Event Horizon Astrophotography (c) 2022
He talked with the students about quantum physics, laser physics, and astrophotography, along with how his Christian faith and work as a scientist fit perfectly together. When students were asking for his email, asking me for copies of his slides, and staying after class to discuss further the wonders of space, I knew this had been a meaningful event.
Duces Discipuli Facti
As soon as the last bell of the day had rung, another small group of students came to the room for a leadership meeting about a Latin club event. My intent was to let them handle everything, and I doubt I could have added much that afternoon anyway. My mind and heart were already too full from the Zoom class with Dr. Jenkins. As it turned out, I was not needed. These student officers led with such efficiency they could have given a lesson to many adults. They worked together, listened to each other's ideas, yet did not become stuck in the mire of indecision. Just when I thought my heart could take no more of being impressed with students, I was overwhelmed by their display of leadership skills. In Book 1 of the Aeneid, Vergil describes Queen Dido by saying, dux femina facti, the leader of the deed was a woman. In this case, the leaders of the deed were students, and I could have offered nothing that would have made their work better. On the drive home, I called my wife and more or less babbled. I could not find the words to describe these extraordinary young people and was reminded of the a scene in Contact, the 1997 movie featuring Jodie Foster as Dr. Ellie Arroway, who takes a trip through a wormhole to another part of the universe. Stupefied at what she sees, all she can say is that instead of a scientist, they should have sent a poet.
Life's Rich Pageant
For many people, the phrase "life's rich pageant" is familiar because it is the title of R.E.M.'s fourth album, although it has a much longer history. I reach for that phrase often, for it captures perfectly what is my typical experience of the academic and educational life. Have I known the sorts of stories that are driving so many people out of the education profession? I have, but they have never been the norm. When given the opportunity, young people will astonish with the depth of their thought and their ability to do something with it, and I saw that once again just the other day.
Update
Two weeks after publishing this post, I came across an amazing, new discovery. The star catalogue of Hipparchus, long thought to have been lost, has been discovered, in part, as a palimpsest at an Egyptian monastery. The following images are from the article about this amazing find in the Journal for the History of Astronomy.
Detail of f. 53v, beginning of the first column of undertext (Syriac overtext in dark brown, and faint traces of a few letters of the undertext).
Detail of f. 53v (multispectral image, by the Early Manuscripts Electronic Library and the Lazarus Project of the University of Rochester processed by Keith T. Knox: the enhanced Greek undertext appears in red below the Syriac overtext in black).
An excellent article in Nature puts this amazing discovery into context. As we continue to learn more about the ancient world, we also find new ways to combine modern technology with fields of study such as archaeology, linguistics, philology, science, and more. Putting together a passion for classical studies, computer imaging, and astronomy, for example, can lead to an exciting career, and as the Roman playwright Terence once wrote, "Homo sum: humani nil a me alienum puto." "I am a human being: I think nothing human alien to me." (Heuton Timorumenos, 77)
A few of the books that overflow the ten bookshelves, tops of filing cabinets, and windowsill in my classroom.
In a Facebook group called Latin Teacher Idea Exchange, a Latin teacher named David Smith posted a picture similar to the one above. He wrote, "Whatever else you do this year, remember our OFFICIUM: Keep the voices
in these books alive in your students--lest they fall into oblivion. We
are so blessed to be Latin teachers!" He went on to say that he had posted his picture and comment because it is easy for teachers to forget why they do what they do. He concluded, "If we fail
in our task, who will read Vergil, Tacitus, Caesar, or Cicero in the
next generation?"
The word David used is officium. It is the root of the English word "office," which far too often people thing of merely as a place to do work. Yet the Latin words suggests much, much more. At its root are the words opus and facere, meaning "work" and "to do/make." The word opifex meant a craftsman or artificer, and opificium described, according to the Oxford Latin Dictionary, "the performance of constructive work." Officium was a contraction of opificium and came to have a wide range of meanings including an act of service or respect and one's duty or obligation to another.
Now consider the office of a teacher. We have a duty, indeed even a sacred trust, to pass on what we have learned, and David's question has haunted me for several years. In no sequence of high school classes can students plum the depth or explore the breadth of Classical writing. It is humanly impossible. We do as much as we can, of course, and if we are not going to read Aristotle or Plautus, I can at least mention their names and hope that someday, maybe, one of my students may see those names scrawled in an old notebook and seek out their works. A quotation from Benjamin Jowett, taken from the preface to his translation of Thucydides, hangs outside my classroom door. "[T]he voluminous learning of past ages [has] to be recast in easier and more manageable forms. And if Greek literature is not to pass away, it seems to be necessary that in every age some one who has drunk deeply from the original fountain should renew the love of it in the world, and once more present that old life, with its great ideas and great actions, its creations in politics and in art, like the distant remembrance of youth, before the delighted eyes of mankind." Teachers are translators. We literally carry the ideas of humanity from age to the next. We have been called to a wonderful, delightful opificium, and it is the performance of this most constructive work that is the teacher's true office.
"I am a college-educated American. In all my years of formal schooling, I never read Plato or Aristotle, Homer or Virgil. I knew nothing of Greek and Roman history and barely grasped the meaning of the Middle Ages. Dante was a stranger to me, and so was Shakespeare. "The fifteen hundred years of Christianity from the end of the New Testament to the Reformation were a blank page, and I knew only the barest facts about Luther's revolution. I was ignorant of Descartes and Newton. My understanding of Western history began with the Enlightenment. Everything that came before it was lost behind a misty curtain of forgetting." The Benedict Option, p. 154, Rod Dreher As I read these words, I was struck by the realization that there, but for the my chosen field of Classics, would have gone I. Plato, Aristotle, Homer, Virgil...why, of course, I thought, but then I paused. Had I actually encountered them in any class not of my choosing? I thought long and hard about it, and the answer was no. In my high school senior English class we read a bit of Chaucer, and I will always be grateful for the introduction I received to Pope, Donne, and Keats from that teacher, Mr. John Richardson. I also got from him Shakespeare's sonnets to go along with Hamlet, Romeo and Juliet, and Julius Caesar, the only Shakespearean plays I would ever be required to read throughout my educational career. Somewhere there were bits of Homer's Odyssey. There was no significant world history class for my high school diploma. As an undergraduate at Indiana University, I took only two English classes. Through one, a survey, I was introduced to Dante, though only parts in the Norton Anthology that included glimpses of the Old Testament as literature. I took only one history class, and that was in ancient history for my major in Classical Studies. Only in classes that I chose to take as a high school Latin student or undergraduate and graduate student in Classics did I encounter any of the following: Caesar, Cicero, Horace, Catullus, Lucretius, Vergil, Plato, and Herodotus. I was introduced to Montaigne and Hume in an elective freshman honors seminar. Although we read part of Augustine's Confessions in that class, I had never heard of the church fathers until I casually encountered them through friends in graduate school, and then it was not in any class. All that I know of Aquinas has been acquired on my own. The same goes for Anselm, Descartes, and Milton. Alexis de Tocqueville, The Federalist Papers, and The Constitution of the United States of America...if I had not read them of my own accord, they would hold no place in my knowledge. In fact, as I survey the significant authors on my bookshelves, I find that at best I know of a few from any required class in my schooling. Most I learned about on my own, and almost all I have read solely outside the classroom. My encounter with Latin in high school sparked an interest in me that led me to pursue undergraduate and graduate degrees in Classics, and it was through that interest and study that I have come to know most of what I know of any importance. Friends, such things ought not to be. The human heritage bequeathed to the world through the history, literature, and theology of the West should not be a curiosity available only for a kid who studies Latin to discover. Should everyone become a Homeric scholar or an expert in Dante? Of course not. But everyone should be introduced to the true gems of human discovery and achievement. Whether or not a person picks up one of those gems and makes it his or her own is up to that student. This much, however, is true. Any school or system of education apart from a program of specific skills training that does not, as Benjamin Jowett wrote in the preface to his translation of Thucydides, "present that old life, with its great ideas and great actions, its creations in politics and in art, like the distant remembrance of youth, before the delighted eyes of mankind," stands convicted of dereliction of duty and betrayal of its true mandate.
