Homeschool Conference 2010: Prof. Joseph Pearce (#2)

OK, at some point, I’m going to have to finish writing up the homeschool conference.  Preferably, before we re-start school for the year (which happens the first full week of August for us; it’s just too hot to be out, so we might as well be inside, studying, so that we can be outside gardening come May).

Next up was Prof. Joseph Pearce again, this time discussing “Reclaiming Christian Culture.”

One of our goals in education, and homeschooing in particular, of course, Prof. Pearce said, is to hand on the inheritance of 3,000 years of Western Civilization.  If it’s true, furthermore, it is not just western, it belongs to the whole world.  It also has to be noted that it is synonymous with Christendom, i.e. Catholicism.

Looking at history, J.R.R. Tolkein noted the, “splintered fragments of the one true Light that comes from God.”  God, Prof. Pearce pointed out, watches over everyone’s path.  In history, particularly, God was preparing the Greeks through gifts of creativity and reason.  That stream would combine with the Christian faith fulfilling the Old Testament to form what we call Western Civilization.

In Greece, Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle, by reason, concluded that there must be gods.  Eventually, the philosophers’ thought moved towards the conclusion that there must be one god.  Also, the philosophers saw the physical world as the expression of the supernatural world that powers it.  Later, Augustine “baptized” Plato, discussing him with Christian eyes, just as Aquinas would later use the Greek philosophers to help explain certain points of Christian doctrine.

Of course, the Enlightenment dismissed all of this beautiful synthesis of faith and reason (which the Catholic Church has always held as complimentary) as the Dark Ages, since everything before the dawn of the philosophes had to be darkness and ignorance, right?  Prof. Pearce pointed out that “Enlightenment” was a name the new movement claimed for itself, not that anyone else decided they actually merited; he holds that “the Disenchantment” would be a more accurate description of the movement.  Quickly, there was no more beauty or order, only accidents.

Tolkein fights this view in his creation myth in the Silmarillion, with the music of creation.  Similarly, C.S. Lewis writes a creation myth for Narnia that includes the “song of Aslan.”  Scientists have found twenty physical constants that have to exist for the universe to allow for life (the odds of them all being right are like the odds of looking for one particular grain of sand on all of the world’s beaches).  Yet, our modern mindset is firmly rooted in the accidentalness of existence.

And so we come to modern times.  The Church is, yet again, in exile.  This shouldn’t alarm us terribly, Pearce pointed out; exile is the norm.  Jesus was rejected, the English martyrs were killed and others were exiled, etc.  Always, at some level, exile is the normal state of things for Christians.  He cited the “Salve, Regina”, “… and after this, our exile…”, describing our hope for Heaven, our true home.

So, this is our challenge as parents: to pass on the valuable inheritance of Western Civilization to our children so that they can pass it on.  Prof. Pearce gave five steps to this process:

1. Have children.  Rather obvious, isn’t it?  But birth rates aren’t just plummeting among secularists.  The problem here is that secularism and worldliness are “very successful parasites,” in Prof. Pearce’s words; fight against them, but don’t be too shocked if not all of your kids remain faithful Catholics.
2. Love in the home.  The example of loving parents is a witness to the love of Christ and the Church.  It is (or should be) an indissoluble union of self-sacrifice.  And it’s more attractive than the cheap immitations the world offers.
3. Sacramental life.
4. Change the world.  You can’t perfect it, but you can work to move it in the right direction.  Particularly of note here is the concept of subsidiarity: the family is the heart of economics and politics.  Whatever undermines the family is to be shunned.
5. Pass on the inheritance.

G.K. Chesterton said, “A thing worth doing is worth doing badly.”  We want to do it well, obviously, but we should be willing to do it badly, Prof. Pearce explained, because the alternative is not doing anything at all.

And that’s not really much of an alternative.

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Homeschool Conference 2010: Prof. Joseph Pearce (#1)

Yes, I’m ignoring politics for… well, for a while.  Different day, same junk.  We’ll see how the November mid-term elections go… not that I’m sure that’ll fix everything, or even most things, because we usually get the government we deserve.

Prof. Joseph Pearce, of Ave Maria University in Florida, talked on “The Quest for Shakespeare.”  (Yes, he has a book out: The Quest for Shakespeare and his new, follow up, Through Shakespeare’s Eyes, which analyzes the plays for Catholic markers and trends.)

Of course, we all grew up with the, “Gee, we don’t know much about him, Shakespeare could’ve been…” and then the teacher filled in with the latest trendy guesswork.

Pearce’s point is that of course we don’t know too much about Shakespeare: being a Catholic was a crime during his lifetime.  You don’t exactly leave a huge papertrail detailing your Catholicism in those circumstances.  But a few clues creep through.

(First, some terminology.  Conformists were Catholics who grudgingly attended Anglican services, largely to avoid the heavy fines that were levied on Catholics.  Papists were outwardly conformed to the Anglican church, but also secretly went to Catholic mass when they could.  Recusants were devout and defiant Catholics who refused to go to Anglican services and, consequently, paid the fines.  Obviously, although all are Catholics, the recusants were the most likely to still be Catholic after a generation or two.  The conformists and papists generally compromised enough that their children and grandchildren failed to understand the gravity of the argument, comfortably fitting into the state-approved Anglican church.)

So, as a Catholic, you could be fairly unobtrusive… unless you were a recusant, in which case there would be records of fines, possibly imprisonment, etc.  If the first fine failed to “convince” you of the wonderfulness of the newly-created Anglican church, there would be many records of fines and other punishments.

William Shakespeare’s mother, Mary Arden, came from a family of staunch recusants.  Several of his uncles were executed for their stubborn Catholicism.

William’s father had an extended political career; for a time, he was the mayor of Stratford on Avon, a fact that is often cited as proof that John Shakespeare must not have been a Catholic.  However, most of the town council of Stratford were recusants; they’re on the list of people being fined for recusancy.  Eventually, after the continued resistance of the recusants, Queen Elizabeth made the oath of allegiance to the queen as the head of the Anglican church mandatory… and John Shakespeare promptly disappears from politics.

Furthermore, John Shakespeare’s “Spiritual Last Will and Testament” was found hidden in the rafters of his house in Stratford.  This document was nearly identical to similar items found in Spain, Mexico, and Switzerland.  The Wills, however, seem to have originated with the Bishop of Milan, (St.) Charles Borromeo, who issued them during a plague in Milan.  Due to the overwhelming number of deaths, many people were unable to have a priest to attend to them before death, so the Will was a sort of “confession by desire” statement for those who would die without the comfort of having a priest to hear their confession and bless them.  Many of the English priests studying in Rome passed through Milan on their way back to England, staying some time with Bishop Borromeo.  A letter from secret priests in England requested “more testaments”, which were “in huge demand,” which, from the numbers requested, seems to refer to these “Spiritual Last Wills” and not a Bible (which would have been prohibitively expensive and bulky to smuggle into England in the numbers requested).

In 1592, John Shakespeare was again fined as a recusant.  William Shakespeare’s daughter, Susanna, would also be fined as a recusant.

Most of us heard the story about Shakespeare leaving Stratford in a bit of a hurry.  There was some rumor about problems with the local lord, maybe poaching, or possibly something about a critical poem.  Sir Richard Lucy, the local lord, was also the leader of the anti-Catholic hunting squad.  So, there is some hint that the poem criticized Sir Lucy, who was the anti-Catholic lord of a stubbornly Catholic area… which resulted in a prompt exit to the anonymity of London for young William.

Recently, a German researcher found three or four cryptic signatures at the English college in Rome’s guest book.  (England was an anti-Catholic police state; even the guest book could be used as a way to catch Catholics, hence, most signatures were not real names.)  The researcher thinks the pseudonyms were Shakespeare’s, and they appear in the years immediately before and after his years of fame in England.  (Last year, Prof. Pearce also pointed out some details that would seem to support the idea that Shakespeare went to college, first in London, then abroad, as laws against Catholics attending college were tightened, which would also explain some of the arguments about, “Will Shakespeare didn’t go to college and didn’t travel, so he must’ve just been a front for someone else who really wrote this stuff.”)

Another piece of circumstantial evidence (remember, outright evidence could be deadly), is the lack of a funeral eulogy for Queen Elizabeth.  All the “big names” in English literature wrote one… but not Shakespeare, who was probably the biggest name in theater at the time.  Why not, unless it was that Shakespeare was Catholic, and, thus, not particularly hoodwinked by the “Good Queen Bess” routine?

At the end of his career, Shakespeare returns home to Stratford on Avon, but buys a house in London: the Blackfriars’ Gatehouse.  (Yes, the name is linked to one of the theater companies he worked with, as well.)  Shakespeare already owned the second largest house in Stratford; why invest in real estate now?  For starters, the blackfriars were the Dominicans, wiped out by Henry VIII.  The gatehouse of their razed monastery had been kept in Catholic hands since the order was destroyed in England.  It was known to be a hub of underground Catholic activities in London.  Furthermore, the sale contract stipulates that the person living in the gatehouse must stay; John Robinson was known to be active in the Catholic underground, and his brother was then studying in Rome for the priesthood.

Finally, Shakespeare’s will named his daughter Susanna as executrix.  Susanna was a recusant; her sister Judith had married a Protestant.  The will’s beneficiaries were primarily Catholics.  Again, it doesn’t state on the will, “I, William Shakespeare, am a Catholic and have always remained so…” but it might as well.

Apparently, it was enough to convince some.  Fifty years after Shakespeare’s death, an Anglican vicar disparaged and dismissed him, saying Shakespeare “died a papist.”

Of course, Prof. Pearce has two books on the subject, which I will also point out are probably much more detailed than my notes from his one hour talk.  And, as always, the conference talks are available from the IHM Conference website.

In London, Shakespeare was sued.  His co-defendants were all recusants.  His accusers were anti-Catholic hunters who raided houses to catch Catholics.

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7 Quick Takes Friday: Homeschooler Conference

I was going to try to write this last week, half-way through the IHM Homeschooler Conference in Washington, DC, but the last talk finished after 9pm, I’d been up since a time of morning I’d rather forget, and I still needed a shower.  So, instead, I’ll post this as a summary of the homeschooler conference I’ll call:

Why the Homeschooler Conference Was So Wonderful

1.  Two days without the kids.  Yes, I love my kids; that’s why I homeschool, although the kids may think I’m doing it to torment them.  (“Oh, look, lightpoles!  Let’s count them by two’s…  What letter does ‘lightpole’ start with?  Come on, sound it out.”)  But, once in a while, it’s nice to love them from a distance.  Although I’m not sure how much distance is involved when the whole purpose of the weekend was to improve their schooling.

2.  The vendors’ area.  Our state homeschooler association ran a cartoon in their e-newsletter with an awed mom in a denim jumper asking, “Is this heaven?” as she surveyed the curriculum fair.  I’d view it more as purgatory (not an option, to be fair, for our state homeschooler association- it’s of a definitely evangelical Protestant bent).  But I did get almost all of my curriculum shopping done, partially just because I was so overloaded I said, “Sure, [flip, flip] that looks good.  And one of those, no I don’t need the new edition, and I have the text but need the workbooks for that…  That’ll be how much?!”

3.  Seeing people in person you usually only see on TV or hear on tape.  Very weird.  Yes, that’s Raymond Arroyo, the anchor for EWTN’s weekly news program The World Over.  I felt like I should hold up my fingers to put his face in a frame; I’m used to seeing him on TV.

4.  Getting books autographed.  This one’s very funny for me; I am so not a groupie/hero worship/fan type of person.  I may like someone’s work, even admire it, but I figure they’re really too busy to want to talk to every single person who can say, “Oh, I read your book, can I talk your ear off?”  Actually, everyone was incredibly personable.

• Dr. Ray Guarendi briefly discussed the prevalent attitudes in adoption literature with me.
• Prof. Joseph Pearce took the time to discuss his book-writing schedule as if I was the only person in line (new book from him focusing on the Catholicism of the Lord of the Rings in 2012 or so; he’s otherwise committed until then).  In the meantime, I wrote a post on his talk of the same subject.
• Dale Ahlquist signed a copy of his critical edition of G.K. Chesterton’s epic poem Lepanto with a self-depreciating smile and, “There; now it isn’t worth anything!”
• Susie Lloyd was very sweet.  (and if you haven’t read her hilarious first book of essays Don’t Drink the Holy Water: Homeschool days, rosary nights, and other near occasions of sin, I’d highly recommend it.  I’ve only just started her new one, Forgive Me Father, For I Have Kids, but she said she thought it was even funnier.  Both books are available over here.)

5.  Discipline encouragement.  Virginia Seuffert, mother of twelve, grandmother of several more, talked about order and discipline in the home, focusing around the themes of why we homeschool.  Dr. Ray Guarendi, child psychologist and father of ten adopted, homeschooled children, talked about discipline, homeschooling, and the culture.  (I also discussed his new book on adoption in my post on his talks.)  When you spend so much time going against the grain (often to the chagrin of your family, parish, pediatricians, random store clerks who obviously know better, etc.), it is a relief to sit down and be surrounded by people fighting the same battles.

6.  Homeschooling encouragement.  The ones I would place in this category also fell into the discipline category, while others fell into this and spiritual encouragement.  Why do we homeschool?  Why bother?  Because Truth matters.  Truth is freeing; “there is no truth” creates only a shallow swamp of a culture.  I especially liked Prof. Joseph Pearce’s talk “A Matter of Life and Death: The Battle for a True Education.”  (Summed up here.)  Dale Ahlquist’s talk on G.K. Chesterton covered some of the same ideas.  (Sorry, but I’m behind: I’d meant to have all the talk summaries done by now, but the Ahlquist/Chesterton post will be coming later this weekend.  Check back later.)  To sum up this point, I offer the ever-quotable Chesterton, himself an adult convert to Catholicism, and once required reading in almost every English-speaking university:

The Catholic Church is the only thing that saves a man from the degrading slavery of being a child of his age.

7.  Feeling “normal” for once.  I have never seen so many fourteen-passenger vans, pregnant women, and pro-life bumper stickers in one place.  I can’t get pregnant and my three kids still fit in a minivan, but I still felt like I belonged a lot more than I usually do out in public.  And I just loved this license plate.  I nearly passed it up, wondering what people would think of the weirdo taking photos of someone’s plates, but decided I had to get a photo for the DH:

 (That’s short for Benedict the Sixteenth, i.e. the current pope, fondly referred to as B16 in some circles.)

As always, click on the giant post-it at the top to visit Jen at Conversion Diary for everyone else’s 7 Quick Takes Friday.

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Homeschooler conference: Prof. Joseph Pearce (part 2)

Prof. Joseph Pearce’s second talk was “A Matter of Life and Death: The Battle for a True Education.”

He offered his own life and conversion as proof of his thesis.  Given a mostly secular, only sort of Protestant, anti-Catholic education that skipped philosophy and concentrated all of its history curriculum on the *glorious* rise of socialism in England, Pearce grew up to become heavily involved in the anti-Catholic terrorist organizations of Northern Ireland.  After being encouraged to read G.K. Chesterton’s writings on distributism while looking for an alternative to both capitalism and Marxism, Pearce gradually shifted away from the poisons he had embraced in his life.  Eventually, he converted to Catholicism.  The first book he wrote was a biography of Chesterton.  A thank-you to Chesterton for leading him to God, he said, and a thank-you to God for Chesterton.

A true education, Pearce explained, “has to be an education where truth matters.”  If you don’t believe in the Truth, you can’t breathe life into education, you can only kill it.  We talk about “the good, the true, and the beautiful.”  Well, God is Love (good), God is Reason (true), and God is Beauty (beautiful); these things we seek to study have their utmost roots in God.  Without God, we can’t teach these ideals.  (Which is what has happened to education: if there is no God, then the good, true, and beautiful also get dumped.)

Love, of course, has converted many.  Malcolm Muggeridge, a famous journalist and satirist, converted to Catholicism after doing a biography of Mother Teresa.  Senator Sam Brownback, initially somewhat perplexed by the fuss over her, also converted to Catholicism after escorting her in DC for an awards ceremony; about to leave, she looked into his eyes and said simply, “All for Jesus.  All for Jesus.  All for Jesus.”  One of Mother Teresa’s favorite saints was St. Therese of Liseux, who described a “little way” of, not great and glorious deeds for God, but “little deeds with great love.”

Beauty has also converted many would-be atheists.  Not coincidentally, beauty has also been rooted out of our education system.  I remember a sadly funny essay from This Rock on the author’s experiences with an art teacher who told them that good art isn’t necessarily true, or beautiful, or even communicative… “Well, then how will you grade us?” she asked.  At the end of the semester, she was rather icily told she had no aptitude for art and shouldn’t sign up for the next class.  Yeah, right.  Or many people’s comments on modern art: it isn’t beautiful, it doesn’t show technical ability, it doesn’t communicate anything… why is this art?  Just because it *daringly* rebels from all ideas of beauty?

Christianity, on the other hand, has produced almost 2,000 years of art.  Tolkein saw art and imagination as a key component of humanity being created in the “image and likeness of God.”  God creates, and so can each one of us.  None of the animals create; they may use primitive tools, but they don’t make art.  The gift is uniquely man’s.  Tolkein saw a hierarchy in the world:

• Creator = God
• Creation = man, animals, plants, etc.
• Sub-creation: man’s use of Creation to reform it into new creations, either to the glory of God, or to the utility of man (lowest on Tolkein’s hierarchy)

So, in summary, Pearce argued, a true education must include reason, virtue, appreciation of the beautiful, and engagement with beauty (creativity).

The overarching problem with modern education, Pearce said, is that liberal secularism preaches tolerance, but is totally intolerant of anything that disagrees with them.  This leads to “dwemism”, racism against dead, white, European males.  “I take some issue with that, since most of my friends are dead, white, European males!”  And yes, he continued, it’s racism, since Webster’s defines racism as hatred of someone for something they can’t help being.  Well, one usually can’t help being dead, and never any of the rest of it.  Still, you only need to read a history textbook to observe how many of the DWEM’s have been excised from even being mentioned.  (My kids’ Virginia history textbook glanced over Robert E. Lee, skipped all the rest of the Confederate leaders, and spent the rest of the section on the Civil War extolling the virtues of two women who took care of wounded soldiers in their homes.  Um, that’s nice, but DWEM’s or not, aren’t there more important people to discuss?  Sorry, I guess that’s very DWEM-centric of me to suggest one person might be more important than another…)

The problem is, those DWEM’s have a lot of wisdom, influence, and culture.  Turning the usual argument on its head about education being not about force-feeding dead, white males, but of some form of socialization, Prof. Pearce concluded, “Education is not about what you know, but who… ok, sure: Plato, Aristotle, Tolkein, Dante, Austen, Shakespeare…”

Cutting ourselves loose from our history has not freed us.  A lack of history leaves you with people who don’t know where they came from, where they are, or where they’re going.  In short, lost.

Which, I would argue, answers so many Americans’ question right now of, “How did we get here?!”

 

For a less garbled, much more eloquent treatment of the subject, go here to order the actual tape of Prof. Pearce’s talks.

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Homeschooler Conference: Prof. Joseph Pearce (part 1)

Ok, this had very little to do with homeschooling, but they were a couple of great talks.  Prof. Joseph Pearce of Ave Maria University talked on “Finding Tolkein’s Catholicism in the Lord of the Rings” and “The Fight for a Good Education: A Matter of Life and Death” (coming tomorrow; I took pages and pages of notes on Pearce).

Pearce told his conversion story in This Rock.  To sum up, he was raised Protestant (sort of), became an atheist, joined a number of anti-Catholic organizations in Northern Ireland, made the “mistake” of reading G.K. Chesterton while in prison, then C.S. Lewis, then Tolkein… and converted to Catholicism.

Of course, nowadays, few people notice that J.R.R. Tolkein had any faith at all.  (A national Christian music station even aired a complete piece of drivel insinuating that the Protestant C.S. Lewis had “encouraged Tolkein to become a Christian and put his faith in his writing.”  Um, no, it was Tolkein who was key in Lewis’ conversion, actually.)  Many of the markers of Tolkein’s faith within his stories are not obvious.  Tolkein had a rather scathing disdain for allegory; in his essay “On Fairy Stories”, Tolkein argued against allegories where the author sort of winked over the heads of the foolish children at the adults reading to them.  That isn’t fair to the audience, he said, nor to the story.

In spite of that, Pearce pointed out, Tolkein did call The Lord of the Rings an “allegory of death and immortality” and, “… of course, a fundamentally religious and Catholic work.”  Tolkein also said it is an “allegory of power, particularly about power usurped for domination.”

Prof. Pearce opened with a discussion of the creation myth in The Silmarillion, which I’ve brought up before on this blog.  It opens with, “In the beginning, there was the One,” named Illuvatar (the “all Father”).  So, contrary to some analysis, Tolkein’s world is not atheistic, it is, in fact, both theistic and specifically monotheistic.  Pearce went on to discuss how Illuvatar introduced the music of creation, and Melkor tried to overwhelm it with his own disharmonies.  Illuvatar took even the disharmony and wove it into the plan.  When Melkor (“Mighty one”) finally falls into the void (in language echoing Isaiah’s description of Lucifer’s fall), he (like Lucifer (“Light bearer”)) loses his good name and becomes Morgoth, the “adversary” (“satan” is Hebrew for “adversary”).

Throughout Tolkein’s work, the ancient conflict between the serpent and humanity surfaces: Sauron is related to “saur” (Greek – lizard, remember: Tolkein was a linguist), Saruman is related to Sauron, Wormtongue is related to the Old English wyrm, which meant dragon.  (As Pearce said, when the old chronicles reported knights going out to fight “wyrms”, they weren’t stomping earthworms!)

Ok, you might say, those are old archetypes, maybe Tolkein was just tapping into our instinctive dislike of worms, snakes, and dragons.  How can you prove it’s all Catholic?

The clincher, from my point of view, is the issue of the dates.  When I first read it, I though it very odd that, suddenly, the text seemed to come to a screeching halt to point out a date.  Huh?  The hobbits didn’t seem particularly tied to dates or calendars… I had an odd sense that there was something the author was trying to tell me, but not being raised a particularly traditional Catholic, I had no inkling what.  The two specific dates that Prof. Pearce highlighted (there are others) were the date the Fellowship left Rivendell (Dec. 25- ring a bell?) and the date the One Ring was destroyed (Mar. 25).

The journey starts in earnest on Christmas and final victory comes on the date of the Annunciation, Mar. 25, when God took on our flesh in the womb of the Virgin Mary.  (Pearce commented that this was his one complaint against the Church: that we don’t properly celebrate the true feast of the Incarnation, which is the Annunciation, not Christmas, because life begins at conception.  (standing ovation)  He sort of laughed and commented that he didn’t get quite as positive a response when he said that at the University of Iowa.)

Tolkein, being a medievalist, would also have known of the medieval tradition that suggested that the Crucifixtion also took place on Mar. 25.  (The feast of Passover moves, based on a lunisolar computation that puts it on the 14th of the lunar month.  Given the uncertainty of the exact year of Christ’s crucifixtion, it is impossible to know what date it took place.  Medieval commentators hypothesized that it would properly round things out to have Christ’s incarnation and crucifixtion on the same date, the beginning and the end of his work.)

Prof. Pearce also drew a connection between the elves and Christians.  Both are immortal (the elves literally, the Christian spiritually), and both are living in exile, looking towards the more perfect land on the distant shore.  Galadriel, one of the leaders of the elves at the time of LOTR, says that she and her husband have “fought the long defeat.”  The world is fallen, and evil doesn’t stay beaten.  Having lived through WWI (“the war to end all wars”), serving as an officer in the trenches, Tolkein must have felt keenly that WWII was a perfect example of evil resurfacing after a defeat.

Prof. Pearce went into a number of other parallels between Catholic theology, tradition, and history (particularly Catholic history in England), but I’ll refer you to the website again for the tapes.

Just one last thought, which will make you look a little more suspiciously at your TV.  Remember the palantir?  These were the seeing stones; a person could look into them and communicate with others holding the other palantir.  Poweful people could bend them to look almost anywhere.  The elves created them to communicate, gifting some of them to the Numenoreans, who brought them to Middle Earth.  At the time of LOTR, Sauron has at least one of them, giving him a sort of override on what the other stones see.  He can’t show a lie, only control what part of the truth the viewer sees.  Thus, Saruman and Denethor are both convinced that the fight against Sauron is hopeless, based on what Sauron let them see in their palantir.  Prof. Pearce explained that Tolkein had been horrified by the propaganda spread by radio and TV during the World Wars.

The name “palantir” means “far seeing”.

The name “television” means “far sight”.  (tele- Greek, “far”.  visio- Latin, “sight”)

As I keep explaining to my kids about the news or the history books, it isn’t just what is said, it is how it is said and what isn’t said.  Part of the truth, slanted a certain direction, is still a form of lie.  How much of what we see do we trust?

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