The Church Necessary for Reading the Classics

"And the only hope that I can see for the study of Latin and Greek, in their proper place and for the right reasons, lies in the revival and expansion of monastic teaching orders." T. S. Eliot, Modern Education and the Classics, 1933.

There has not been a revival and expansion of monastic teaching orders. Eliot, as in his exchanges with Christopher Dawson, was more of a diagnoser than a prognosticator. Latin and Greek study has increased in classical schools, especially Catholic classical schools, without the revival of monastic orders.

But Eliot has a point here that he made elsewhere. I would be so bold as to say, with Christopher Dawson, that Western Civilization is a byproduct of monasticism. After the collapse of the western Roman Empire, it was the Benedictine commitment to work, to reading, as a part of their search for God, that both preserved antiquity (all pagan Latin works that survive stem from medieval copies written by monks) and led to new literature, forms of history, art and science which have their roots in the middle ages (and not simply, as is sometimes thought, in the Enlightenment).

For Catholics, classical education is ultimately a byproduct of their faith, as western civilization was a necessary byproduct of medieval monastic vows. The important claim that Eliot is making here, it seems to me, is that if we want to be more than mere antiquarians, if we want the past to live, it can only live in an ecclesial context. As western civilization has cut off its ecclesial roots over the past few centuries, it has withered and its progress towards death is accelerating over time. There has been a movement in the past 100 years to preserve great books, or, in the past twenty years, to provide a classical education in a secular framework. What is not said is that those promoting classical education tend, for the most part, to be Christians, even if they work in secular settings.

For Eliot, trying to do classical education in a secular setting is to cut off something living from its source of life and, perhaps more importantly, not to place classical studies in its  "proper place and for the right reasons."

For Catholics, a classical education and all of western civilization is a great gift that makes life better. But if classical education isn't conducted "for the right reasons" it has no life and doesn't serve the right end- as an aspect of an overall human formation whose goal is to grow "unto a perfect man, unto the measure of the stature of the fulness of Christ" (Ephesians 4:13).