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Cassiodorus and Classical Education with Joseph Griffith and Joshua Kinlaw · Christians Reading Classics

• 0:18
  SPEAKER_03: When I realized that there was such a zealous and eager pursuit of secular learning, by which the majority of mankind hopes to obtain knowledge of this world, I was deeply grieved, I admit, that holy scripture should so lack public teachers, whereas secular authors certainly flourish in widespread teaching.
• 0:40
  SPEAKER_03: Together with blessed Pope Agapitus of Rome, I made efforts to collect money so that it should be, rather, the Christian schools in the city of Rome that could employ learned teachers, the money having been collected from whom the faithful might gain eternal salvation for their souls, and the adornment of sober and pure eloquence for their speech.
• 1:05
  SPEAKER_03: They say that such a system existed for a long time at Alexandria, and that the Hebrews are now using it enthusiastically in Nisibis, a city of Syria.
• 1:17
  SPEAKER_03: But since I could not accomplish this task because of raging wars and violent struggles in the Kingdom of Italy, for a peaceful endeavor has no place in a time of unrest, I was moved by divine love to devise for you, with God's help, these introductory books to take the place of a teacher.
• 1:40
  SPEAKER_03: So wrote Cassiodorus in opening his book, Institutions of Divine and Secular Learning.
• 1:48
  SPEAKER_03: Cassiodorus is a complicated guy.
• 1:50
  SPEAKER_03: He had a brilliant political career in the time of Theoderic.
• 1:56
  SPEAKER_03: But around 538 A.D., right as the Byzantine reconquest of Italy was about to begin, he published a collection of his state letters, the Varii, and then he disappeared for 50 years from all record.
• 2:14
  SPEAKER_03: But then, it turns out, 50 years later, as he was dying at his country estate, he left these books, the institutions of divine and secular learning, and also some others, like on the soul.
• 2:28
  SPEAKER_03: And as a result, we now have his thought from the second career that he had, which fascinates me to no end, a man who was a politician for the first portion of his life and then became a devoted student of, well, we'll talk about what in just a minute.
• 2:48
  SPEAKER_03: So welcome to Christians Reading Classics, a podcast from Mere Orthodoxy.
• 2:54
  SPEAKER_03: I am Nadia Williams, book's editor for Mere Orthodoxy, and your host today.
• 2:59
  SPEAKER_03: And I am delighted to be having this conversation about Cassiodorus today with two experts in classical education and really who read Cassiodorus thoughtfully and will be our guides for this purpose.
• 3:15
  SPEAKER_03: So, first, Joshua Kinlaw is affiliate assistant professor of classical education in the University of Dallas in the Master's Program in the Humanities.
• 3:26
  SPEAKER_03: Before returning to graduate school, he taught for several years in independent and classical schools.
• 3:33
  SPEAKER_03: Also joining us is Joe Griffith, who is the William Blackstone Professor of Law and Society and the director of the Classical Learning Program at the Ashbrook Center at Ashland University.
• 3:44
  SPEAKER_03: And I should say that in his spare time, Joe enjoys helping with homeschooling his own children and also listening to sad dad music.
• 3:53
  SPEAKER_03: And the two may or may not be connected.
• 3:56
  SPEAKER_03: So welcome, both of you.
• 3:58
  SPEAKER_02: Thanks.
• 3:58
  SPEAKER_02: Thanks for having us.
• 4:00
  SPEAKER_03: Let's get into Cassiadoris.
• 4:02
  SPEAKER_03: But really, before we get to Cassiadoris, I have to ask you the question that I ask everyone on this podcast, and that is what is a classic?
• 4:11
  SPEAKER_02: Classic is a book that speaks to the human condition in a fundamental way.
• 4:18
  SPEAKER_02: And there are a couple of signs that something might do this.
• 4:22
  SPEAKER_02: The first sign is time.
• 4:24
  SPEAKER_02: So if a text has endured for generations or centuries or even millennia, that's a sign that this has uh that this is worth studying, that it speaks to what it means to be human in like a deep, deep way.
• 4:39
  SPEAKER_02: The second sign, though, is that it is um sufficiently capacious to merit multiple reads.
• 4:49
  SPEAKER_02: It grows upon each visit.
• 4:52
  SPEAKER_02: So each time you sit down and read the text over again, it reveals something new about itself or about you, uh, or or that it grows on you.
• 5:04
  SPEAKER_02: So I think that uh reducing a classic to something that is old um might make us miss modern classics.
• 5:14
  SPEAKER_02: Uh and surely I wouldn't put something like Marilyn Robinson's Gilead on the same level as Plato's Republic, but at the same time, I think that we should read modern classics.
• 5:28
  SPEAKER_02: Uh this definition also means that we look at classics not just because of their historical significance, but because they speak to something that transcends time.
• 5:39
  SPEAKER_02: Uh so I'm reminded of W.
• 5:41
  SPEAKER_02: E.
• 5:41
  SPEAKER_02: B.
• 5:41
  SPEAKER_02: Du Bois, who writes that uh he sits with Shakespeare and he winces not.
• 5:47
  SPEAKER_02: Shakespeare is interesting not just because he can write about his own time in in in England, uh, but because he can communicate to an African-American man in the early 20th century who's wrestling with uh racial oppression and injustice and trying to figure out who he is.
• 6:07
  SPEAKER_02: Uh Shakespeare can be a guide to Boys.
• 6:10
  SPEAKER_03: Josh, do you have anything to add?
• 6:13
  SPEAKER_01: I don't know if I do have much to add to that.
• 6:15
  SPEAKER_01: That was a very good answer.
• 6:17
  SPEAKER_01: Uh the first part of it sounded like a C.S.
• 6:19
  SPEAKER_01: Lewis quote, so well done, uh, Dr.
• 6:22
  SPEAKER_01: Griffith.
• 6:23
  SPEAKER_01: I I am interested in the um the staying power characteristic and um history.
• 6:32
  SPEAKER_01: I completely agree with the I I like Joe's word capacious, I think.
• 6:39
  SPEAKER_01: Um on the other hand, I I think there is something in uh capital T tradition, um, things being handed down that does um encourage each individual to look as far back as possible um chronologically.
• 6:59
  SPEAKER_01: Um and I think you see that in the word classic.
• 7:02
  SPEAKER_01: I I don't I think it is rooted um sometimes in a distant time and place.
• 7:08
  SPEAKER_01: And I think our author today um really demonstrates that quite clearly about uh maintaining and handing on the tradition.
• 7:19
  SPEAKER_03: I like that.
• 7:20
  SPEAKER_03: And whenever we talk about tradition, I think we also consider humility, like that we do not living in the present, we do not have the wisdom to know everything that should be studied.
• 7:32
  SPEAKER_03: And so we look to tradition to tell us what other authors that we might not have even like considered picking up have stood that test of time.
• 7:41
  SPEAKER_02: I I totally agree.
• 7:43
  SPEAKER_02: I just want to echo what Dr.
• 7:44
  SPEAKER_02: Kinlaw said.
• 7:45
  SPEAKER_02: Uh, and you mentioned C.S.
• 7:47
  SPEAKER_02: Lewis.
• 7:47
  SPEAKER_02: Lewis writes on his S in his essay on the reading of old books that we ought to keep the clean sea breeze of the centuries blowing through our minds.
• 7:57
  SPEAKER_02: And so I can't remember exactly what the number is, but it's something like read two ancient books for every one modern book you read.
• 8:05
  SPEAKER_03: Well, since uh two of the three conversationalists here today have degrees in classics, obviously we agree.
• 8:14
  SPEAKER_03: So we have a good ratio of one semi-mod, I guess Joe is the modernist, and you have two ancient people having this conversation.
• 8:22
  SPEAKER_03: So that works well.
• 8:24
  SPEAKER_03: It does.
• 8:25
  SPEAKER_02: I'll be the token modernist.
• 8:26
  SPEAKER_02: Okay, thanks.
• 8:28
  SPEAKER_03: Absolutely.
• 8:29
  SPEAKER_03: So on a related note, um, I wanted to ask you about classical education, because the reason we are talking about Caciadores involves that.
• 8:38
  SPEAKER_03: So for those who might not have a clear definition in mind, what is classical education today?
• 8:44
  SPEAKER_03: And what is the role of classic books, those classics we just talked about in it?
• 8:50
  SPEAKER_01: So I think um the classics, this really just takes me back, I think, to my previous um to your previous question.
• 8:58
  SPEAKER_01: I think it's sort of an another aspect of that same question about what makes a classic, and we've both spoken to the staying power.
• 9:05
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, there is this retrospective um approach that is allowing, however, for attention to the present uh present and thinking about even the future.
• 9:18
  SPEAKER_01: Um but in in my experience of American classical education, I think there is uh an unapologetic um attention to and and in some ways devotion to um the classical era, that is the roughly thousand years, um, five hundred years on either side of the turn of the millennium.
• 9:42
  SPEAKER_01: I think there's a good argument for that being the grounding.
• 9:46
  SPEAKER_01: Um and then allowing students, uh especially as they get into um perhaps the upper grades or what's a lot of people call the rhetoric stage, um their reading list is going to grow, of course, um both in terms of themes but also in terms of uh chronological period.
• 10:08
  SPEAKER_02: Classical education is uh having uh a renaissance in recent years.
• 10:13
  SPEAKER_02: Uh part of it can be attributed to Dorothy Sayers' uh 1940s lecture, The Lost Tools of Learning.
• 10:22
  SPEAKER_02: And there are many different ways of slicing this, but one of the emphases of classical education is that we're trying to educate the whole person, not workers, not simply workers who will fit as cogs into the economic machine.
• 10:40
  SPEAKER_02: Uh it it starts with this premise that human beings um are uh have free minds, capable of pursuing the truth and wisdom, and so we want to equip students in Sayers' term with the lost tools of learning.
• 10:58
  SPEAKER_02: So we definitely want to read great books, uh classics uh from the ancient world, and for similar reasons that Dr.
• 11:07
  SPEAKER_02: Kenlaw and I were saying before.
• 11:09
  SPEAKER_02: Uh, and the other way of thinking about it too is that we want to give students uh the tools that will equip them to continue learning and to love learning long after they graduate from high school.
• 11:24
  SPEAKER_02: And so oftentimes you'll hear classical educators talk in terms of the trivium and the quadrivium.
• 11:31
  SPEAKER_02: The trivium is grammar, logic, and rhetoric.
• 11:37
  SPEAKER_02: And the goal with these subjects is that they're very interconnected and they seek to prepare students to learn how to handle words.
• 11:48
  SPEAKER_02: Uh words are symbols that represents reality, and so if you don't know how to use words, you d you will be you will be used by them, or other people will use you through words.
• 12:01
  SPEAKER_02: And then the other half of this is the quadruvium, which is arithmetic, music, geometry, and astronomy.
• 12:07
  SPEAKER_02: And the goal there is to help students see the harmony or order of the world.
• 12:14
  SPEAKER_02: And uh, I don't want to get ahead of ourselves, but um this is something that Cassiodorus speaks at length about.
• 12:22
  SPEAKER_03: So this brings us now to Cassiodorus, a man who spent the first part of his career as an illustrious politician.
• 12:29
  SPEAKER_03: And then, as I suppose happened quite a few times in earlier Roman history, whenever politicians are driven out of politics, they turn to study and writing.
• 12:40
  SPEAKER_03: I mean, we could name people like Cicero, who did likewise in Sallust in the Roman Republic.
• 12:46
  SPEAKER_03: But Cassiodorus did a different sort of writing.
• 12:50
  SPEAKER_03: So tell us who was Cassiodorus.
• 12:54
  SPEAKER_01: So I I should say a little bit about how I discovered him.
• 13:00
  SPEAKER_01: And that is, uh, that was, in a word, late.
• 13:03
  SPEAKER_01: I was well into graduate school when um one of my teachers, who is a medievalist, uh Tom Head, who's a great uh scholar, he recommended uh hearing I was interested in St.
• 13:18
  SPEAKER_01: Augustine.
• 13:19
  SPEAKER_01: He recommended first um Augustine's work De Doctrina Christiana or on Christian Teaching, among other titles that goes by.
• 13:28
  SPEAKER_01: And he also recommended this fellow of whom I'd never heard anything about, Cassiodorus, who I could immediately see was one of the most important and earliest receptors of that classical and Augustinian uh tradition, Western tradition, at a time when West uh and the East were being uh there was a dynamic there and a tension there as the political gravity shifted from Rome to Constantinople.
• 14:01
  SPEAKER_01: You see that same shift in Cassiodor's life.
• 14:05
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, there came a time when he did not have the option of staying in Italy in terms of safety.
• 14:12
  SPEAKER_01: So he went to Constantinople, which was at that point uh experiencing um a cultural, uh cultural and economic growth that it had not seen before.
• 14:23
  SPEAKER_01: And really the center of political and cultural gravity in the Mediterranean had shifted east.
• 14:27
  SPEAKER_01: After which, to go back to uh Nadia's introduction, he sort of uh he comes home as it were, and I mean that kind of literally, he goes to his hometown, Squilace, way down in the southern toe of the Italian peninsula, if you can kind of picture that, and establishes a monastery that he calls the Vivarium.
• 14:51
  SPEAKER_01: So as Nadia said, there's there's quite clearly, though there's gaps in Cassiodorus's biography, there's quite clearly uh you can see two phases.
• 15:02
  SPEAKER_01: The first is political, and he was really, we should say, uh he was among the elite there.
• 15:08
  SPEAKER_01: And then the second was this scholar, scholar um monk to an extent, uh, for his retirement.
• 15:16
  SPEAKER_01: Um, his dates are a bit um uh they usually start with a CA circa.
• 15:25
  SPEAKER_01: There's a little bit of uncertainty there.
• 15:27
  SPEAKER_01: But by all accounts, he lived a long life, uh probably well into his 90s.
• 15:33
  SPEAKER_01: Um, and just one other chronological note there this is about two generations after St.
• 15:39
  SPEAKER_01: Augustine.
• 15:39
  SPEAKER_01: So Cassiodorus is born, those of you who enjoy timelines, Cassiodorus is born in something like 485.
• 15:46
  SPEAKER_01: So, and if you know anything about ancient history, as all your listeners do, you know that that's after the fall, the classical day for the fall of Rome.
• 15:56
  SPEAKER_01: So this is a different world that Cassiodorus is living in.
• 15:59
  SPEAKER_01: It's very much the world described to some extent in Augustine's City of God, right?
• 16:06
  SPEAKER_01: Augustine too can see what's happening here.
• 16:09
  SPEAKER_01: But about two generations after that, one other thing I wanted to add, if I may, Nadia, about that first stage, the the Roman polit political scene, it's very interesting to me, and and any reader of Cassiodorus or of the fifth century studies, um, or period, excuse me, we do know he was associated with Boethius.
• 16:36
  SPEAKER_01: And it's fascinating to me that going back, if I can connect this directly to sort of classical education practice, so Boethius is on everyone's reading list, right, at some point in their classical school.
• 16:49
  SPEAKER_01: Well known, uh basically a baptized classical ed author by any account, especially his consolation of philosophy.
• 16:58
  SPEAKER_01: Of course, he's martyred.
• 17:00
  SPEAKER_01: Um, and it so happens that both figures are almost certainly in the Imperial Palace at the same time working for Theodoric, as you said.
• 17:11
  SPEAKER_01: One of them uh runs afoul of Theodoric, the other one does not.
• 17:18
  SPEAKER_01: There has to be a story there, not to say uh an HBO miniseries of this sort of political tensions going on in the background, right?
• 17:28
  SPEAKER_01: So, anyways, the more I learned about Cassiodorus, the more fascinated I was.
• 17:33
  SPEAKER_01: Um let me pause there and see if you'd like to guide me from here.
• 17:39
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, I I love this.
• 17:40
  SPEAKER_03: Um, and again, like highlighting that development.
• 17:43
  SPEAKER_03: You know, it's interesting what you just mentioned, how classicists know Boethius, but they don't know Cassiodorus.
• 17:50
  SPEAKER_03: And that was my case.
• 17:51
  SPEAKER_03: Uh, the reading list for PhD exams and classics ends with Boethius, and he is considered this book end.
• 17:58
  SPEAKER_03: After Boethius, we're talking about the medieval world.
• 18:02
  SPEAKER_03: And this overlap between him and Cassiodorus is a good reminder to us that um we like to make history neat on timelines and all that, but the reality is that people are complicated.
• 18:14
  SPEAKER_03: So simply by living a lot longer, Cassiodorus became relegated to early Middle Ages.
• 18:20
  SPEAKER_03: Whereas by being martyred as a young man, relatively speaking, Boethius became the last of the classical authors.
• 18:27
  SPEAKER_03: But the two uh have remarkable similarity in their thought, and both have clearly been readers of the same classics of the entirety of the ancient world.
• 18:40
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, and for those interested in the, you know, the as Nadia, I know you're aware of the sort of the history of a 20th century scholarship on this period.
• 18:48
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, another way to introduce Cassiodoris is he is a or or he was once considered sort of a prototypical character of the quote unquote dark ages.
• 19:00
  SPEAKER_01: And historians have moved away from that terminology.
• 19:04
  SPEAKER_01: It's been stressing out medievalists for a few generations now, dark ages.
• 19:09
  SPEAKER_01: But there's certainly a reason why it was known as that.
• 19:12
  SPEAKER_01: It's just because of these huge gaps we have in the historical record.
• 19:15
  SPEAKER_01: So that that's real on the one hand, but another thing you mentioned early medieval studies.
• 19:22
  SPEAKER_01: Um uh thank God for Peter Brown, right?
• 19:25
  SPEAKER_01: Peter Brown basically, over the course of his career, establishes what we now tend to call late antiquity or late antique studies and really put it on our map as this fascinating um time period.
• 19:40
  SPEAKER_01: And another uh, sorry, one more voice, scholarly voice.
• 19:43
  SPEAKER_01: Of course, in classical ed, we're all about the primary sources, but for those interested in a good history of the period, Peter Brown is uh unavoidable, uh essential.
• 19:54
  SPEAKER_01: And then also one of his former students, Dame Avril Cameron, who uh just passed away actually this month, but is definitely worth looking into, both in terms of her scholarship, but also her talks.
• 20:09
  SPEAKER_01: Um, she's very good on this period, very good on Cassiodorus, and uh is a real no-nonsense, uh refreshing speaker as well.
• 20:18
  SPEAKER_03: This is Cassiodoris.
• 20:19
  SPEAKER_03: Now, the question we're here for is why do we care about his views on education and especially what we call classical education today?
• 20:29
  SPEAKER_02: I I'll take a swing at this.
• 20:31
  SPEAKER_02: Um Cassiodorus is one of the, if not the most important figure in the history of classical education that most people have never heard about.
• 20:44
  SPEAKER_02: Uh, he has a quiet influence.
• 20:47
  SPEAKER_02: He is not uh an original thinker per se, but he is a transmitter.
• 20:55
  SPEAKER_02: He is a transmitter of Christian heritage and culture and an intellectual tradition.
• 21:02
  SPEAKER_02: So this is not glamorous work, uh, but he's uh, as um one scholar writes, he's among the first to recognize that Christianity had developed an intellectual culture worthy of transmission.
• 21:16
  SPEAKER_02: He's a compiler.
• 21:18
  SPEAKER_02: Uh he's um so this book that he wrote, The Institutions of Divine and Secular Learning, is a book about books.
• 21:29
  SPEAKER_02: It's a handbook for classical educators.
• 21:34
  SPEAKER_02: He writes, as Nadia, you wrote a read at the beginning of this podcast, um, he tries to start a school, what we would probably call a classical school, in Rome, but because of the political turmoil, it fails.
• 21:51
  SPEAKER_02: And so he retreats uh in failure uh to the toe of Italy and Quietly transcribes uh uh these texts, tries to eliminate errors in these texts, and then writes this book as a way of supplementing or even uh r replacing teachers in these classical what we would call classical schools, uh again, for the transmission of this intellectual uh culture.
• 22:29
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, I would just add to that um the the I think implicated in in Dr.
• 22:35
  SPEAKER_01: Griffith's comment there is that the stakes could not have been higher.
• 22:39
  SPEAKER_01: Um and you know, this goes back to the now politically incorrect nomenclature about dark ages.
• 22:45
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, there was something very dark about this time period.
• 22:49
  SPEAKER_01: If you take Cassiodorus's word for it, if you take other authors of his period word for it, there was um would Christian education and the tradition survive was very much a question.
• 23:04
  SPEAKER_01: And Cassiodorus is, as uh Dr.
• 23:07
  SPEAKER_01: Griffith said, one of a clear one of the clear examples of someone who actually dedicated his life, the latter period of his life, to, as he said, saving, maintaining, copying, and transmitting the gold that was uh classical education at the time.
• 23:29
  SPEAKER_01: Remember, he knew well what uh Augustine also knew well about um the so-called Egyptian gold or stealing from the Egyptians, right?
• 23:42
  SPEAKER_01: In terms of uh so taking what is good and what is from God and the so-called pagan tradition and handing that forward.
• 23:50
  SPEAKER_01: Um and and another thing to say that that we should you know mention, I'd encourage everyone to get their hands on.
• 23:57
  SPEAKER_01: There is there is a relatively inexpensive paperback of the translation of Cassiodorus Institutions of Divine and Secular Learning.
• 24:07
  SPEAKER_01: And I I really encourage people to just get their hands on it.
• 24:10
  SPEAKER_01: It's just we should also admit it's a strange book, it's quirky, right?
• 24:14
  SPEAKER_01: You mentioned the word handbook, that's absolutely right.
• 24:18
  SPEAKER_01: But we don't spend most much of our free time reading handbooks, right?
• 24:23
  SPEAKER_01: Or manuals.
• 24:24
  SPEAKER_01: But this is there is a manual aspect of this.
• 24:28
  SPEAKER_01: Um, and that, but that is directly tied to the context that I just tried to mention of saving, restoring, copying.
• 24:37
  SPEAKER_01: We had to, and another thing we should mention about Cassidor's institutions is it was remarkably, I might call it small d democratic.
• 24:48
  SPEAKER_01: Um, it was for for everyone.
• 24:51
  SPEAKER_01: He he realizes and even explicitly mentions in at least one place in the institutions that not all of his audience, the brothers, the people there at Vivarium, can handle the spelling, the writing, the copying.
• 25:07
  SPEAKER_01: And that's okay.
• 25:08
  SPEAKER_01: They're gonna have other things to do.
• 25:11
  SPEAKER_01: There's something really refreshing about that, and and perhaps surprising when I say monasticism, you think scholasticism, etc., right?
• 25:19
  SPEAKER_01: Geniuses, eggheads, right?
• 25:21
  SPEAKER_01: But that's that was not the case in Cassiodorus' immediate uh context.
• 25:26
  SPEAKER_01: He there is uh a certain genius about him, um, but as I think Dr.
• 25:31
  SPEAKER_01: Griffith hinted, he he very much looks up to people like St.
• 25:36
  SPEAKER_01: Augustine on the one hand or Cicero on the other as these brilliant minds.
• 25:40
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, Dr.
• 25:41
  SPEAKER_02: Kinlaw mentioned for the rest of the brothers, I mean, he he talks about uh the importance of study to understand scripture, and we should talk about that in a minute, too.
• 25:52
  SPEAKER_02: But he writes, it is quite appropriate for monks to cultivate gardens, to plow fields, and to rejoice in the harvest of fruits.
• 26:04
  SPEAKER_02: Uh so I I love Dr.
• 26:06
  SPEAKER_02: Kenlaw what you're saying.
• 26:07
  SPEAKER_02: It's very democratic.
• 26:09
  SPEAKER_02: Uh egg-headed intellectuals don't have a monopoly on access to God.
• 26:16
  SPEAKER_02: In fact, there might be something intellectuals can learn from the simple life of uh of a monk who struggles intellectually but is able to rejoice in the work that God has given him.
• 26:33
  SPEAKER_03: But also the idea that we see in some classical schools today that that to educate the whole person is not just to educate the brain, that um I guess we're still fighting against the Gnostic idea of separating, you know, the soul from the body and all of that.
• 26:49
  SPEAKER_03: But yeah, we are whole persons, which means uh body, mind, soul, and all of that.
• 26:54
  SPEAKER_03: And all of these aspects of us need education.
• 26:57
  SPEAKER_03: So I really like that.
• 26:59
  SPEAKER_03: By the way, fish ponds, what role do fish ponds and the vivarium play in all of this?
• 27:04
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, well, that's the name.
• 27:06
  SPEAKER_01: The vivarium is what we would call an aquarium or or a tidal pool with lots of aquatic critters inside.
• 27:14
  SPEAKER_01: So it was part, it was uh also you know an element of agriculture more broadly.
• 27:19
  SPEAKER_01: It was part of the farm, right?
• 27:21
  SPEAKER_01: Where those fish tanks, if I could call them that.
• 27:23
  SPEAKER_01: So that's where the name of the monastery comes from.
• 27:26
  SPEAKER_01: We do have, as you'll see in any version of the book, institutions, we do have a pretty early and medieval uh illustration and description of the his what I might call his compound there.
• 27:39
  SPEAKER_01: Um, just really beautiful, and and fish are highlighted in that medieval drawing as well.
• 27:45
  SPEAKER_03: Beeson Divinity School, an evangelical seminary at Sanford University in Birmingham, Alabama, offers a robust Master of Divinity, forming students in person in a community-oriented model of theological education.
• 27:59
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• 28:12
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• 28:20
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• 28:24
  SPEAKER_00: Most Christian parents I know want to pass their faith on to their kids, but there's a tension.
• 28:29
  SPEAKER_00: The work of discipling your children has largely been outsourced to church programs like Sunday School, Youth Group, and Children's Ministry.
• 28:37
  SPEAKER_00: And those things are great.
• 28:39
  SPEAKER_00: But the research actually suggests that when faith formation is treated like a class to complete, the kids graduate from church the same way they graduate from high school.
• 28:47
  SPEAKER_00: They just move on.
• 28:48
  SPEAKER_00: Mir Orthodoxy has put together a free ebook called Spiritual Formation for the Family that takes a different approach.
• 28:55
  SPEAKER_00: It's rooted in the life of the household and the family and takes the spiritual formation of the family seriously.
• 29:01
  SPEAKER_00: It's practical, it's theologically serious, and it's free.
• 29:06
  SPEAKER_00: You can get access to it and even download a free PDF of it at Mereorthodoxy.com slash family.
• 29:12
  SPEAKER_00: That's Mereorthodoxy.com slash family to get free access to spiritual formation for the family.
• 29:19
  SPEAKER_03: So let's say a um a classical parent um is listening to this podcast and they're thinking, okay, great, I'm gonna get me a copy of this really delightful paperback of Cassiodoris.
• 29:34
  SPEAKER_03: Walk them through it.
• 29:36
  SPEAKER_03: What happens?
• 29:36
  SPEAKER_03: So they open the book.
• 29:37
  SPEAKER_03: How do you read this for the first time?
• 29:39
  SPEAKER_03: This is a quirky book.
• 29:41
  SPEAKER_03: How do you read a quirky handbook to classical education for the first time as a 21st century classical parent in America?
• 29:48
  SPEAKER_01: Well, as I I called it, I'm gonna stand by my word, uh, my adjective quirky.
• 29:54
  SPEAKER_01: A quirky is does not need to mean intimidating.
• 29:57
  SPEAKER_01: Um, if you can make your way through Boethius' consolation of philosophy, you can certainly make your way through this work.
• 30:05
  SPEAKER_01: So it's not a matter necessarily of difficulty, but it's just a matter of of genre and tone.
• 30:11
  SPEAKER_01: So, for example, much of the first book, which we might loosely call a chapter, right?
• 30:17
  SPEAKER_01: He says books, it's two halves of the same work, institutions, which is a sort of a terrifically boring English word, but it's something you could also maybe translate this foundations of spiritual and secular learning.
• 30:33
  SPEAKER_01: That's probably more palatable for most of us.
• 30:35
  SPEAKER_01: And the so the first half, the first so-called book, it really does start at what I might call ground zero.
• 30:43
  SPEAKER_01: These are the books of the Hebrew Bible, these are the letters of Paul, these are the prophets, and we just but again, if you you don't have to be a historian to keep what Nadia mentioned, that humility in mind earlier.
• 31:05
  SPEAKER_01: Um, just recognize the basic historical context.
• 31:09
  SPEAKER_01: There was not general knowledge necessarily about what constituted scripture at this time.
• 31:18
  SPEAKER_01: Yes, there was a tradition.
• 31:20
  SPEAKER_01: I'm not saying anything radical here, but these points of discussion, which we take for granted as settled, Cassiodorus is trying to assure that they remain settled.
• 31:30
  SPEAKER_01: And that's why he's going to the trouble of listing the books of the what we would call the canon.
• 31:37
  SPEAKER_01: He's he's he is re-establishing, as it were, this canon, which again we know was a long process.
• 31:46
  SPEAKER_01: And then the second book, briefly, uh, is where he turns to so-called secular letters.
• 31:54
  SPEAKER_01: And this, too, it's it's really hard for moderns to appreciate how valuable this is, but it is, as we said, it's a handbook of the seven liberal arts.
• 32:08
  SPEAKER_01: And those of you who know anything about the history of those liberal arts, know that that too was very much a process and really only being defined or canonized, put down once and for all by people like Cassiodorus.
• 32:24
  SPEAKER_01: So we've had, in fact, I'm sure you're aware, you know, it was it was his generation, and most people would say Boethius himself, who first uses that word trivium, right?
• 32:35
  SPEAKER_01: The idea of three ways with language.
• 32:38
  SPEAKER_01: A generation or two after that, apparently, we get our first mention of the word Dr.
• 32:43
  SPEAKER_01: Griffith mentioned earlier, quadrivium, the the other four, right, related to numbers.
• 32:49
  SPEAKER_01: And so to have from say, you know, 550, 570, the year 570 of this area era, a statement, a definition of those arts is indeed precious.
• 33:05
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, uh, and and so why why read this book?
• 33:10
  SPEAKER_02: Uh two answers.
• 33:11
  SPEAKER_02: One is uh he could not be more important for canonizing the liberal arts.
• 33:18
  SPEAKER_02: Uh uh what happens to American classical education in the 21st century if you remove Cassiodorus from the picture.
• 33:28
  SPEAKER_02: The other reason to read uh Cassiodorus' institutions is, as Dr.
• 33:33
  SPEAKER_02: Kenlaw was talking about there a little bit, the relationship between what we call broadly the liberal arts or the uh what we might call classical education to the relationship of those things to Christianity and to faith.
• 33:48
  SPEAKER_02: So this topic of the relationship between faith and reason.
• 33:52
  SPEAKER_02: And this again is not settled at the time, or even maybe today, but Cassiodor says that the liberal arts are useful on their own, these secular studies, these studies of the present age, but especially as tools by which we can better understand scripture.
• 34:14
  SPEAKER_02: So he writes Uh the divine law exploits its varieties of language in sundry ways, being clothed in definitions, adorned by figures, marked by its special vocabulary, equipped with the conclusion of syllogisms, gleaming with forms of instruction.
• 34:38
  SPEAKER_02: In a word, you can learn scripture more fully if you understand the arts of grammar, dialectic, and rhetoric.
• 34:49
  SPEAKER_02: Students of scripture will be better prepared to understand the Bible if they have prior knowledge of the liberal arts.
• 34:59
  SPEAKER_02: So Cassiodorus says uh book one is about divine learning, and and that's the that's the point, that's the gravitational center of classical education for Cassiodorus.
• 35:12
  SPEAKER_02: But also, it kind of like Jacob's ladder in a way, uh, these liberal arts are tools or a way of more easily accessing the word.
• 35:24
  SPEAKER_02: Right?
• 35:24
  SPEAKER_02: For I w we can get pretty spiritual or theological here, but the word was made flesh and dwelt among us, and for some reason, uh God reveals himself not just in the person of Jesus Christ, but also through his written word.
• 35:43
  SPEAKER_02: Uh and so Cassiodorus is emphasizing that as a whole, Christians have a responsibility of understanding how words work because that's how God has clearly communicated with us through his word.
• 36:01
  SPEAKER_03: I love that.
• 36:02
  SPEAKER_03: So, in other words, it's not just while while we're not called to be eggheads, so to speak, uh at the same time, all Christians have to be educated to some degree.
• 36:13
  SPEAKER_03: And it seems like uh Cassiodorus is saying this education is for everyone, even if not everyone will go to the same heights, perhaps.
• 36:23
  SPEAKER_03: So talk to me about this, because it seems like there's a there's a general kind of um sense today, classical education gets this bad rep as exclusionary.
• 36:34
  SPEAKER_03: So talk to me about this, because that's clearly not what Cassiodorus is saying.
• 36:41
  SPEAKER_01: No, and uh sorry, I've just got to go back because to Augustine at least one more time.
• 36:49
  SPEAKER_01: Augustine, who Cassiodorus knew knew the writings quite clearly and intimately, but you know, another key moment for me and Augustine, and and sorry, just to back up for a second, we're talking about here about the the relation of uh to use that word again, pagan literature with so-called wisdom philosophy to early Christians.
• 37:13
  SPEAKER_01: And of course, this is a huge and very complicated question, but in Cassiodorus, another great thing about why read Cassiodorus, you have uh uh hard evidence, if I can call it that, of one man's approach to that literature.
• 37:29
  SPEAKER_01: You see it in Augustine, then you see it again in uh Cassiodorus.
• 37:33
  SPEAKER_01: Let me give two quick examples.
• 37:35
  SPEAKER_01: There's a passage, I believe it's uh desordne on order of the universe of Augustine's, where he's climbing, to use that metaphor one more time, the ladder towards utter contemplation and enlightenment when he looks across the room and sees his mother Monica, and it completely breaks the flow of his contemplative conemplative conversation, and he says, Oh, but then there's Monica.
• 38:04
  SPEAKER_01: And I'm paraphrasing, she's doing everything correctly as well.
• 38:09
  SPEAKER_01: The implication, the the what we have to keep in mind is that there's good reason to believe that Monica was illiterate, right?
• 38:16
  SPEAKER_01: She is not climbing that contemplative ladder.
• 38:19
  SPEAKER_01: And Augustine pauses and says, But then there's my mother.
• 38:24
  SPEAKER_01: And her path is equally valid.
• 38:26
  SPEAKER_01: We talked about to move to Cassiodorus, you know, that passage where he says he's fully aware that not all of his brothers can even read this handbook, let alone employ all his recommendations.
• 38:42
  SPEAKER_01: But I just note that in doing so, he says, if in some of the brothers, cold blood stands like a barrier around their hearts, as Virgil reminds us, he says.
• 38:57
  SPEAKER_01: So he's quoting what we could call, you know, elite, high literate poetry, Virgil's joke uh Georgix, as he's allowing for semi-literate brethren, brethren into this uh intimate circle.
• 39:17
  SPEAKER_01: He he quotes that actually twice in the very passage.
• 39:23
  SPEAKER_02: I I like the way so I I'm a professor at Ashland University and uh the president of our university, who I think has been on this podcast before, John Harris Beattie.
• 39:32
  SPEAKER_02: Yes, Flannery O'Connor.
• 39:34
  SPEAKER_02: He on Flannery O'Connor, yeah, right.
• 39:37
  SPEAKER_02: Uh he he says that what we aim for is an elite education without the elitism.
• 39:44
  SPEAKER_02: And I really like I like the way uh that's phrased.
• 39:48
  SPEAKER_02: Um there was this New Yorker article about the classical education movements a few years ago.
• 39:55
  SPEAKER_02: One of the things that stood out to me in an article published by an outfit that you wouldn't necessarily think would be very hospitable to what has at least become a right-coded movement.
• 40:10
  SPEAKER_02: Whether it is or not is another matter.
• 40:12
  SPEAKER_02: But the author was saying, uh, like praising a lot of the classical education movement because uh I can't remember which borough in New York City it was, but she found that in a class in a in a public school, children were reading classic or sorry, children were reading graphic novels with characters named Aristotle and Dante.
• 40:34
  SPEAKER_02: Whereas in a uh in a classical charter school just across the street, students were reading Aristotle and Dante.
• 40:44
  SPEAKER_02: And so this is this is the education that parents uh many parents would choose if they had the choice.
• 40:52
  SPEAKER_02: Uh and Cassiodorus is a is a nice reminder that um we should open the doors as as widely as possible.
• 41:01
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
• 41:01
  SPEAKER_03: But what would you tell to those parents who want to give this education to their kids, but they did not have it themselves?
• 41:08
  SPEAKER_01: Um I'd say it's arguably uh uh uh with all respect, I don't want to overstate this, but I I was gonna say it's never been as it's never been easier.
• 41:21
  SPEAKER_01: Um there are the just the the number of resources, especially um with the internet, um, there are and now there's a growing number of institutions that I'd call them sort of uh what's the word, para para-academic service.
• 41:40
  SPEAKER_01: Uh it's almost becoming an industry.
• 41:42
  SPEAKER_01: So those who cannot um afford necessarily tuition at the classical school down the street, there's still all sorts of uh hybrid ways to um try to accomplish this mission of classical education.
• 41:58
  SPEAKER_01: Um and I think that's uh obviously how it's been from the very beginning.
• 42:03
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, let's be frank, a lot of this is not just those interested in classical education.
• 42:09
  SPEAKER_01: I think it tends to be moms, quite frankly, who are who are very busy and have different levels of background in education, but who have made this thing happen.
• 42:20
  SPEAKER_03: I love that.
• 42:20
  SPEAKER_03: And you said that uh a couple of years ago when we had a written interview at Current, and you said that the future of classical education, like if somebody writes it, it's gonna be the moms.
• 42:32
  SPEAKER_01: No, I believe that.
• 42:33
  SPEAKER_01: I I mean, and that's my experience at U Dallas.
• 42:37
  SPEAKER_01: You know, most of my students are are seeking a master's, so they tend to be um full-time teachers or full-time moms, or maybe some combination of the two.
• 42:48
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, but it it's quite obvious to me that that's and I think it's kind of always been that way, like going back to the 1980s to some extent in this country with class collet, it's still very much that way.
• 42:58
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, I always tell students babies are welcome in my classroom because I have at least one baby every semester.
• 43:06
  SPEAKER_01: So don't misquote me on that.
• 43:09
  SPEAKER_01: I have one baby in class each semester.
• 43:14
  SPEAKER_03: That's right.
• 43:14
  SPEAKER_03: That could be a good question.
• 43:15
  SPEAKER_03: Wow, Dr.
• 43:15
  SPEAKER_03: Kinson.
• 43:16
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
• 43:18
  SPEAKER_02: I I would say um uh five uh Google um what uh what are the top ten books that uh and then what your classical books that your your age child should read.
• 43:34
  SPEAKER_02: So uh Google five books, five classical books for a freshman and uh and then buy them and then uh put them on your shelf and then uh encourage your kids and maybe yourself too to to read them.
• 43:50
  SPEAKER_02: Um modeling the joys of learning for our kids, I think, can go a long way.
• 43:55
  SPEAKER_02: And then Josh, uh Dr.
• 43:56
  SPEAKER_02: Kinlaw mentioned Kinlaw mentioned You can split the difference there.
• 44:02
  SPEAKER_02: Uh these these like para-academic institutions.
• 44:05
  SPEAKER_02: So um there might be something like this in your neighborhood.
• 44:10
  SPEAKER_02: Ashland University, where I work, has a homeschooling and classical learning center where uh actually, yeah, it's a bunch of uh homeschooling moms and classical learning students who uh you know offer uh Latin tutoring and uh fish dissection days.
• 44:32
  SPEAKER_02: Um there's a growing interest in this.
• 44:35
  SPEAKER_02: So what I'm trying to say is find like-minded people to journey along with you.
• 44:40
  SPEAKER_03: And that is very much the model Cassiodorus employs as well.
• 44:45
  SPEAKER_03: It starts with the Vivarium and him educating the monks, but then the idea is this is a model that can be replicated in any other setting.
• 44:54
  SPEAKER_03: And in the monastery, the monks are each other's family, but in our homes, we read books together, we discuss books, we grow together, and there is this excitement, so like the small D democratic that uh Dr.
• 45:09
  SPEAKER_03: Kenlaw uh described earlier, there's something just really exciting in this process of learning together and even discovering old books we'd never heard of together.
• 45:20
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, and one other note, uh just on you know, sort of parenting parental uh resources, I think, isn't there uh there's growing evidence and data um for this the importance of books on shelves.
• 45:37
  SPEAKER_01: Just having books on shelves in the house, it's almost like you don't even necessarily have to read all of them, but having books on shelves, the physical objects around kids and having that option, I think there's growing evidence for the importance of that and the long-term impact, how that affects a child over the course of their life.
• 46:00
  SPEAKER_01: A lot of it is just, and maybe this is obvious, but I think I'm right that there's increasing evidence.
• 46:04
  SPEAKER_01: And sorry, to me, that is another beautiful aspect of Cassie Doris.
• 46:09
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, Cassiodoris would agree 100%.
• 46:12
  SPEAKER_01: Um, having books around is a good uh apart from intellectual advantage, uh, it's just a good.
• 46:22
  SPEAKER_02: The resurgence of this approach to great books, as uh St.
• 46:28
  SPEAKER_02: John's tutor Xena Hitts has written about, comes from what we might call blue-collar or working class men and women, especially in Great Britain, who realize that there's treasures in old books.
• 46:48
  SPEAKER_02: Some new books too, but there are there's gold uh in these things.
• 46:53
  SPEAKER_02: And and you don't have to devote your entire life to it.
• 46:56
  SPEAKER_02: I mean, you can if you want to, as um maybe those of us on the podcast here have done.
• 47:03
  SPEAKER_02: But even 30 minutes or an hour a day multiple times a week uh will go pretty far.
• 47:11
  SPEAKER_01: Absolutely.
• 47:13
  SPEAKER_01: You think about book two, there it it another aspect of Cassie Doris's story is the history of the book, and I'm not gonna really get into that, but the the history of literacy and the history of the book, this is a fundamental chapter in that story, but just going back to the the there was a certain pragmatism there in books from the very beginning.
• 47:38
  SPEAKER_01: Um there was even a utilitarian aspect, right?
• 47:42
  SPEAKER_01: Books were portable, scrolls were not.
• 47:45
  SPEAKER_01: That's part of the reason books conquered the world, if you will.
• 47:49
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, another thing to Joe's point about we we should be grateful for, you know, earlier our ancestors who really pushed this small D democratic or universal knowledge.
• 48:02
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, we all have penguin classics probably all over our house and all over our school.
• 48:08
  SPEAKER_01: My understanding is those two were that was from the beginning about putting this, uh selling it for cheap, translating it, and putting it the in the hands of any given person who could take it with them on the bus, train, subway, etc.
• 48:26
  SPEAKER_01: So there really is, I think, a perennial interest in getting these treasures to as many people as possible within the movement, kind of from the very beginning.
• 48:37
  SPEAKER_01: I I'd love to think that in any case.
• 48:39
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, I would agree.
• 48:41
  SPEAKER_03: And um, library book sales nowadays, where you can just like take a paper bag and fill it, fill it up for a couple of months.
• 48:48
  SPEAKER_01: That's speaking of bulletin the Egyptians.
• 48:50
  SPEAKER_01: There you go.
• 48:51
  SPEAKER_03: I know.
• 48:52
  SPEAKER_03: Yes.
• 48:53
  SPEAKER_03: Had a conversation about that with my children recently.
• 48:55
  SPEAKER_03: It's like, is this allowed?
• 48:57
  SPEAKER_03: What do you mean we bought a library book?
• 48:58
  SPEAKER_03: It's like, yes.
• 49:01
  SPEAKER_03: Treasures on our shelves.
• 49:05
  SPEAKER_03: So, what advice would you give from all of this that we've discussed, which is also just delightful treasure?
• 49:12
  SPEAKER_03: Uh, what advice would you give to two categories of people from all of this Cassiodorus reading?
• 49:17
  SPEAKER_03: One category is classical school teachers like the ones you teach, uh, and the other is parents, including, well, yourselves.
• 49:25
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, I think I I would just say um get Cassiodorus' institutions.
• 49:32
  SPEAKER_01: It's out there, it's available relatively in relatively inexpensive paperbacks.
• 49:37
  SPEAKER_01: You can also find um various resources online.
• 49:41
  SPEAKER_01: One of the the first big books on Cassiodorus, and and still I think a pretty good starting point for Cassiodorus, it's by James O'Donnell, who's a prof at Georgetown.
• 49:53
  SPEAKER_01: And if I'm remembering correctly, he's put the whole thing online.
• 49:56
  SPEAKER_01: So if you just Google O'Donnell, Cassiodorus, you can find the whole text.
• 50:00
  SPEAKER_01: It's a scholarly biography, but it's it's a good starting point, and it generated a lot of conversation about Cassiodoris.
• 50:08
  SPEAKER_01: There is, as we said, multiple ways to see the figure in his career, but I'd like to think there's sort of something there for everyone.
• 50:16
  SPEAKER_01: You know, going back to what I was saying about his biography, there's this, and Nadia mentioned the the Varii, but there's also uh a relatively new paperback of all of Cassiodorus's letters, which are go under this title Varii.
• 50:33
  SPEAKER_01: It's just a big collection of letters, and that could enrich any um medieval history class, human humanities classes of any uh any number of any number of subjects.
• 50:46
  SPEAKER_01: And that's apart from this specific book institutions that we're talking about.
• 50:50
  SPEAKER_01: Then there's also a more philosophical work, I don't think we've mentioned on the Psalms or commentary, um, which frankly I have not read, but that's another uh that's a third work of Cassiodorus.
• 51:01
  SPEAKER_01: So again, I I just mentioned these other titles to say that it seems like there really is um multiple ways to approach the figure, but I think he he is accessible in any case for teachers and people in administration in classical schools.
• 51:20
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, I definitely recommend uh getting a copy of Cassiodorus' Institutions.
• 51:25
  SPEAKER_02: Uh I have really profited from a short article in Plough magazine by a professor at Wheaton named Richard Hughes Gibson.
• 51:34
  SPEAKER_02: That's a great intro to Cassiodorus' times and the importance of his work.
• 51:39
  SPEAKER_02: Uh for parents, uh more broadly, uh I I think that I would encourage them to consider Cassiodoris' message, which is that liberal learning by that I mean handwriting, spelling, grammar, logic, and using language well, right?
• 52:05
  SPEAKER_02: The classic trivium can be very profitable for a child's faith and making it their own.
• 52:13
  SPEAKER_02: If they can use the tools themselves, uh they can they can you education is a risky business, right?
• 52:22
  SPEAKER_02: You're you're opening the door to things, and it's it's kind of scary, especially as a parent.
• 52:27
  SPEAKER_02: I mean, definitely as a teacher, but certainly as a parent.
• 52:30
  SPEAKER_02: Uh, like what will they find when they open the door and when they pursue truth and wisdom on their own?
• 52:37
  SPEAKER_02: Uh I would encourage them to like just consider Cassiodorus' argument here that giving kids the tools of learning and subordinating that to the pursuit of truth in scripture can really like help students make that faith their own in a deeper way.
• 53:00
  SPEAKER_02: In other words, we are uh we should praise God and serve God with all our heart, soul, mind, and strength.
• 53:06
  SPEAKER_02: So like use your mind.
• 53:08
  SPEAKER_02: Uh Nadia, I know you uh have we've talked uh about these concerns as well, that um Mark Knowles, the scandal of the evangelical mind, or maybe uh the scandal of the what should we call it?
• 53:23
  SPEAKER_02: The pink minds, uh the the the mothers uh who maybe don't have time for reading.
• 53:31
  SPEAKER_02: Um but if Kinlaw is right that the future of the classical education movement depends on mothers, then uh just consider Acasia Doris's arguments that like um knowing and how to use these tools is super important, not just like for the movement in some abstract way, but like for your kids.
• 53:54
  SPEAKER_03: The liberal arts belong to all of us.
• 53:58
  SPEAKER_03: What a thought.
• 54:00
  SPEAKER_03: It's a very Christian thought.
• 54:02
  SPEAKER_03: I mean, that would not have been the pagan thought, the idea that like why would you need to educate everyone?
• 54:07
  SPEAKER_03: But um, as Kisiodorus reminds us, to study the Bible, to grow closer to God, learning is part of our lives.
• 54:17
  SPEAKER_03: Well, friends, as we conclude, I have to ask you the question I always ask as we close each episode: what classic do you wish you had written and why?
• 54:29
  SPEAKER_02: You recently had uh one of my good friends, Sabrina Little, on this podcast, and her answer was uh Plato's Republic, which is definitely the right answer.
• 54:40
  SPEAKER_02: I mean, if uh there is no book besides the Bible, as as I think she said, that is more important uh for us in the 21st century than Plato's Republic.
• 54:53
  SPEAKER_02: But I feel I feel bad about claiming that I wish I had written that.
• 54:57
  SPEAKER_02: I I don't know if I I think I want to pick something that's a little more closer to my capability.
• 55:03
  SPEAKER_02: And so uh I thought about this, anyways.
• 55:05
  SPEAKER_02: My answer is Walker Percy's the moviegoer.
• 55:10
  SPEAKER_02: He uses language to show how language has been impoverished, but also to try to cover the meaning behind the language uh for the good of human beings in general, but like for Christians in particular.
• 55:29
  SPEAKER_02: So my answer is Walker Percy's the movie goer.
• 55:32
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, I'm gonna bring it full circle and give a back to where we started with the definition of what makes a classic, and I'm going to subvert everything I said earlier and say PG Woodhouse.
• 55:44
  SPEAKER_01: There's certainly something classic in a way, just to prove that I'm a not a stodgy old classicist.
• 55:50
  SPEAKER_01: P.
• 55:51
  SPEAKER_01: G.
• 55:51
  SPEAKER_01: Woodhouse, right?
• 55:52
  SPEAKER_01: Any of his stories, uh an absolute delight in the gift of language.
• 55:59
  SPEAKER_01: Um, it's I'm not going to be able to articulate it, but those of you who have read him know what I'm talking about.
• 56:05
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, just pure joy of the capabilities of the English language, again, not necessarily in an intellectual way.
• 56:13
  SPEAKER_01: Um, a real celebration of the form.
• 56:17
  SPEAKER_01: Highly recommended and laugh out loud, funny.
• 56:21
  SPEAKER_02: Kinlaw, this is why we're friends.
• 56:26
  SPEAKER_03: Well, Joe Griffith and Josh Kinlaw, thank you so much for taking the time.
• 56:31
  SPEAKER_03: Two classicists and one modernist walked into a podcast and things happened.
• 56:36
  SPEAKER_03: I like it.
• 56:36
  SPEAKER_03: Thank you both.
• 56:38
  SPEAKER_02: Thank you.