A Classical Approach to History
In recent weeks, I had the opportunity to talk about the accomplishments of Charlemagne in a Medieval History course I am teaching; about how he labored to bring a new order into being out of the welter of brutality that afflicted his era, and how he turned both to the learning of antiquity and the faith of the Church to aid him in those labors. Then we crossed the Channel, and learned about Alfred’s heroic campaign against the onslaught of the Great Heathen Army, and how, after prevailing at last against that onslaught, he too enlisted the scholars of his time to revive faith and learning in his kingdom.
The parallels between these two figures were too obvious for the students to miss. Both lived in periods of great turbulence, confronted by enemies capable of extreme violence and sadism, who represented nothing less than the annihilation of everything those men valued in the world. What was perhaps less obvious to my students – and what I was at pains to emphasize – was the similarity between those projects and the one that we are engaged in as students and teachers in a Christian classical studies program. Like those ancient kings, we find ourselves in an age of disorder – political, cultural, and spiritual disorder – and like those kings, we are turning to the light of Athens and Jerusalem to lead us out of that disorder. Our students are being inducted into the same tradition of learning and piety that men like Alfred and Charlemagne attempted to revive, out of the very same hope and the same high-mindedness. In that sense, the history of that period is no history at all, but a vital, relevant, and spirit-giving model for the present.
The more I have reflected on our classes over the last several weeks, the more these lessons have come to represent something paradigmatic about the classical approach to the teaching of history. The attempt to show how the past lives in the present is, I think, the guiding motive for this approach. To recount history from a classical perspective is to tell a story in which all of our students are characters; a story which awaits its next chapter in the achievements of their own lives.
This approach to the study of history derives from the whole thrust and energy of the classical schooling movement, which explicitly aims to revive our decrepit civilization by forming young minds in conjunction with known standards of truth, goodness, and beauty. Such efforts of cultural reclamation have always received their impetus by turning to the past for inspiration. Over and over again in our history, we read about small groups of earnest, high-minded individuals discovering the beauty and the wisdom preserved in the works of the past, and then setting about the reclamation of that beauty and wisdom in forms appropriate to their own age. The pattern is unmistakable. One of the prime sources of cultural energy for civilized peoples has always been found in the appropriation of the past. History class in a classical school is the vehicle through which our students are connected to that source.
The experience of the modern American adolescent is too often one of anomie and waywardness. Too many of our young people suffer from an acute sense of purposelessness. I should think that graduates of a classical school suffer from no such affliction. Their whole education, the entirety of their mental and spiritual formation, revolves around the great labors of heart and mind with which history tasks them. A whole civilization awaits its renewal in the ministrations for which they have been prepared. Here is no cause for acedia, but a calling – a vocation even – that can orient and elevate the entire lives of our graduates, if they will accept it.