A Papal Pedagogy

Alexander Pope (1688-1744), portrait by Michael Dahl c. 1727

Despite my regular use in the classroom of a smart board, the Internet, and other technological inventions of the modern age, mine is a pedagogy steeped in history and, as recent reading and reflection have shown, are papal, although not in the sense you may be thinking.  Be warned, however, for what follows may take you into waters far from the current educational current.

A Papal Perspective

The adjective "papal" derives from the Latin word for "pope," which is papa, but my use of it here refers not to the Bishop of Rome but rather to the poet Alexander Pope, whose work I first used to open a speech nearly forty years ago and who has remained my favorite English poet all my life.  In the definitive, indeed magisterial, biography of Pope, Maynard Mack explores in one section the Essay on Criticism, which was published in 1711.  If you will, please indulge an extended excerpt from pages 170-174.

[T]he steady expansion of forms of individualism...[fractured] traditional consensuses, leaving most lines of authority apart from personal self-assertion tentative and insecure.  Partly, at least, in response to all this, the Essay shows a pervasive concern for corporateness:  for the responsibility of the individual member, whether a person, idea, work of art, or critical term to some sort of community or whole.  [The Essay on Criticism acknowledged] that the idiosyncrasies of individual intelligence must be tried, and normalized, against the collective principles of the community of educated men.

For since the ancients participate with the modern in this universal and permanent Reason and have left behind them works whose permanent and universal character many centuries have proved, ancient literature must likewise be considered one of Nature's manifestations:  "Nature and Homer were, he found the same" (line 135).  This in turn meant that the Rules -- the principles of effective writing that a long line of critics had derived from Homer and other poets -- were by no means impositions of a dead hand upon the present....

Pope does not intend by this a theory of servile imitation.  He means rather that every new generation must strive to assimilate the art of those whose success in rendering our common humanity...time has demonstrated; the individual talent must steep itself in the tradition; and in Pope's day, when the only internationally accepted literature was that of Greece and Rome..., Homer and Vergil naturally comprised the heart of this tradition.  Pope knows, of course, that criticism cannot afford to let a live tradition degenerate into formulae, dictating "dull Receits how Poems may be made" (line 115); or lose the contemporary élan...that alone enables it to discern and applaud the "Beauties...no Precepts can declare" (line 141).  But he knows with equal firmness that the individual writer's imagination must be guided by his judgment, reflecting the collective experience hived up in the principles of good writing....

[T]he positives...are humility in the presence of what is greater than ourselves and intelligence to rectify our personal vision by collective wisdom.

The 21st Century Classroom

With this I could not agree more.  As I have written, I share my classroom with a vast number of teachers, most of whom are dead, for Homer and Vergil, Aristotle and Cicero, Aquinas and Montaigne and Pope, all teach with me.  As Mack wrote above, we do not go in for servile imitation.  My students have their own voices and their own ideas and insights to express with them, yet it is my task and calling to help them do so in the best way.  Again, this does not mean following "dull Receits," but it does mean introducing to these young thinkers that how a thing is said can help it be heard with greater or lesser effect.  It means pulling back the heavy curtain of prosaic, mundane communication and revealing the intricate beauties of language that have been developed and perfected throughout the ages by the poets and philosophers, the authors and orators whose works have stood the test of time.  Yet again, Mack rightly points out that Pope's vision is to help us develop humility in the presence of that which is greater than we and the intelligence to rectify our own visions, which is quite literally to make them right and straight, with the collective wisdom drawn from the centuries of the human race.

Where Such Teachers

Alexander Pope, attributed to Jonathan Richardson, c. 1736

Toward the conclusion of this section of his biography, Mack quotes a few lines, with which I will conclude, from Pope's Essay as an ideal, one that applies to teachers as well as to literary critics.  He goes on to observe, "Pope shared with most us a total inability to attain this ideal; yet it is touching to see it so vividly sketched."  Unattainable it may be, but I have known many teachers who have spent their lives reaching for it, and whether or not they grasped it, their students were the better served for their trying.  Then again, as Robert Browning put it, "Ah, but a man's reach should exceed his grasp/Or what's a heaven for?"  ("Andrea del Sarto, 97-98)

But where's the Man, who Counsel can bestow,

Still pleas'd to teach, and yet not proud to know?

Unbiass'd, or by Favour or by Spite;

Not dully prepossesst, nor blindly right;

Blest with a Taste exact, yet unconfin'd;

A Knowledge both of Books and Humankind.  (lines 631-634, 639-640)