A remarkable moment occurs roughly halfway through Tolstoy’s famous novella, “The Death of Ivan Ilyich.” It is at the point when Ivan’s illness has advanced enough to make him aware of its terminal nature. The encroaching cognizance of his own impending death stymies Ivan with the sense of an insuperable mystery, one which calls to mind a syllogism he had learned as a child:
Caius is a man, men are mortal, therefore Caius is mortal - had seemed to him all his life to be correct only in relation to Caius, but by no means to himself. For the man Caius, man in general, it was perfectly correct; but he was not Caius and not man in general, he had always been quite, quite separate from all other beings; he was Vanya, with mama, with papa, with Mitya and Volodya, with toys, the coachman, with a nanny, then with Katenka, with all the joys, griefs, and delights of childhood, boyhood, youth.
Ivan grasps, as a purely abstract proposition, the fact that man is mortal. But that he himself is mortal – that the specific, concrete form of being that is Ivan Ilyich is bound to terminate, and that in no short time - is what Ivan finds perplexing. He has never learned to see himself in the syllogism. The general principle articulated through the representative fiction of Caius never struck him as having any particular application to his own experience. His whole life long there has been a gulf between his comprehension of death as a theoretical proposition and death as a personal experience; the spiritual crisis Ivan endures in the latter portion of the story is the effect of those two disparate forms of knowledge crashing into one another.
What Tolstoy calls our attention to here is the difficulty of knowing what we know. Surely, all of us knows that we are mortal, but how many of us know this fact in a manner that bears upon the way we live our lives – in the way we let petty grievances go by, for instance, or the way we frame nobler purposes for our lives than the commonplace and the selfish. The same might be said for everything that we purportedly know – the whole mass of propositions, principles, and beliefs that passes for our supply of the truth. How much of this truth is efficacious for us? How much of it determines how we live or shape our character? That gulf that existed in Ivan Ilyich’s mind between the things he understood and the things he lived by yawns within the soul of each of us.
At the conclusion of his monumental biography of Samuel Johnson, Boswell described the cast of mind which he believed distinguished his subject from other thinkers. “His superiority over other learned men,” wrote Boswell, “consisted chiefly in what may be called the art of thinking, the art of using his mind; a certain continual power of seizing the useful substance of all that he knew, and exhibiting it in a clear and forcible manner; so that knowledge which we often see to be no better than lumber in men of dull understanding, was in him true, evident, and actual wisdom.” To Boswell, the unique virtue of Johnson’s intellect was his ability to apply the fruits of learning, in all their philosophical scope, to actual experience, and thus to make it “useful,” or applicable to lived life.
Clearly, Boswell regarded this ability to transform knowledge in the form of general or universal principles into personally meaningful truth as a rare one. A basic inability to apply what we know to our own lives, in order to live those lives better, would seem to be one of the incorrigible defects of human nature. As such, it stands as one of the great obstacles to the work of the educator, threatening to vitiate the full substance of each lesson and each book that students are likely to encounter in the classroom, by preventing them from applying the meaning to be found there to their own experience.
One of the overriding demands, therefore, of a satisfactory course of study is some pervasive approach or set of practices through which young people are trained to see themselves in their coursework, and to extract its direct applicability to their own lives. Cardinal Newman, in his unjustly neglected Essay in Aid of a Grammar of Assent, lays out one of the key conditions under which any such application must be made. According to Newman, there is a difference between a “notional assent,” which is the credence we lend to propositions arrived at through inference or abstract reasoning, and a “real assent,” which is the belief engendered through experience with concrete things, persons, events, etc. It is only the latter that is “operative,” that influences the way we conduct ourselves, and provides the will with the kind of reason from which it may receive an impetus.
What accounts for the difference between these two forms of assent? It is the engagement of the imagination. “The imagination has the means,” claims Newman, “which pure intellect has not, of stimulating those powers of the mind from which action proceeds.” It is among the daily, embodied world that we deliberate, choose, and act, and so it is in the attire of the daily, embodied world that ideas must appear to us, if they are to engage our volition at all, and become operative wisdom in our lives. The imagination is the faculty that dresses thought in its operative garments, and presents it in all readiness for an active role in our lives.
This decisive power of the imagination points us to the central role to be played by storytelling and poetry in the education of young minds. The power of literary art to bring thought alive, and thus to invite us into a world fit for real assent, has long been celebrated as its special virtue. Sir Philip Sidney extolled just this point in his Apology for Poetry. He declared it to be “the greatest scope to which ever any learning was directed” to “move men to take ….goodness in hand….and know that goodness whereunto they are moved.” In this labor, it is the poet (which for Sidney still means the storyteller as well) that is the “monarch,” since he joins the abstract principle of the philosopher to the specificity of the historian, surpassing both in the transformative power of his art. ”Who reads Æneas carrying old Anchises on his back,” asks Sidney, “that wishes not it were his fortune to perform so excellent an act?” The tale of piety possesses a power to elicit emulation and admiration which the bare theoretical account of the virtue could never attain.
Likewise, Percy Bysshe Shelley commended the power of poetry to help us “imagine that which we know.” It is Shelley’s opinion, as he writes in his Defense of Poetry, that the gulf between man’s abstract knowledge and his ability to act upon that knowledge has grown increasingly cavernous in the modern era. “We have more moral, political and historical wisdom, than we know how to reduce into practice,” he writes, “we have more scientific and economical knowledge than can be accommodated to the just distribution of the produce which it multiplies.” It is the “poetry of life” that has been lost as our “calculations have outrun conception.” It is the art of poetry, therefore, that is required to restore to us our ability to act in accord with the principles we have in our possession.
We read the story of Ivan Ilyich in order to avoid the fate of Ivan Ilyich. We read the tale of Aeneas’ piety to emulate the nobility of Aeneas’ piety. We read Wordsworth’s Intimation Ode in order to imbibe Wordsworth’s reverence towards the ordinary patterns of human development. We enter into the world of fiction and poetry to learn how to be disposed towards the world about us, and to come away better disposed towards the world about us. It is a living, vivid, efficacious knowledge we seek there, and which we find if we are diligent.
The point is not simply to emphasize the centrality which literature ought to occupy in any well-conceived curriculum (a point I think few classical educators need stressed to them), but to underline the need to approach this material in a manner that invites students to connect the experiences represented there to their own experience. It is not simply a booklist that makes a classical school, but a determination to make the knowledge in those books “useful” to the students in their moral and spiritual growth. A constant habit of drawing students’ attention to the applicable content of the literature – of calling attention to the way the author has imagined what we know – is one to be assiduously cultivated in every instructor in a classical school.
Beowulf may be any number of things in any number of classrooms – a creation of a Germanic tongue that would morph into modern English or a member of an early medieval quasi-feudal social order or a representative of a slowly obsolescing warrior code – but in a classical classroom, he is, above all things, a model of the heroic temperament that can never find its purposes exhausted in the concept of duty, and a man who finds real victory in death. He, like all the characters we encounter, is an embodiment of a real potential that is latent in the students’ own character, and of a truth that is theirs to live out.
To help students read in this way is the ultimate end of literary study in a classical school. It is one of the crucial ways we plant in them a propensity to search for what is personally meaningful in the knowledge they acquire. It is how we enable them to attain that “true, evident, and actual wisdom” that is the mark of the genuinely learned, in all times and places.
Well done!