Friday, May 14, 2021

These are all good reasons to learn Latin, but none really answer the question of why Latin specifically: why not Ancient Greek, or Hebrew, or Classical Arabic, or Old Norse –– or any other ancient language with a storied past and rich tradition?

 

Latin was the language of ancient Rome and the primary language of the artistic and intellectual life of the west into and through early modernity. We are, for better and for worse the inheritors of a western tradition whose primary means of thought and expression was Latin, of course. There is, however, also a simple, historical answer to the question of why Latin has always been a cornerstone of “classical education” that gets at the heart of what a classical Christian education is and reminds us of what it is not.

 

As the Roman empire declined and Christianity ceased to be a persecuted religion, a new institution emerged: the monastery. Throughout Christendom men and women sought to create what St. Benedict, whose Rule for monks would become the most widely used rule in the west, called “schools of the Lord’s service.” Monks and nuns took vows of poverty, chastity, stability, and obedience and lived in communities dedicated to prayer, supporting themselves by doing (usually manual) work. While monasteries were anything but isolated from the social, economic, and political life of the world around them (monks and nuns were not typically hermits), the focus of the monastery was not, at least ideally, upon these things.

 

At the heart of the monastic life was the reading of and meditation on scripture, both through the daily rituals of the monastery and through “Lectio Divina” (holy reading), a slow ruminative reading of and meditation on God’s word. And so the monks had to be able to read, understand, and analyze Latin. The founders of the monasteries were Roman aristocrats and so they brought with them the Roman aristocratic model of education: it was the best model they knew. And to teach Latin, they turned to the classics, which they saw as providing the necessary tools for learning. A novice monk or nun could be expected to learn study the basics of the Latin language and eventually progress, just as the Roman schoolboy would, to more complex texts like Vergil’s Aeneid, through which they would learn the finer points of rhetoric and analysis.

 

To put it bluntly, we would know virtually nothing of the Latin classics if it weren’t for copies made in European monasteries during the so-called “dark ages.” For this reason, one often hears that the monks “saved civilization.” This statement is not exactly false, but it overstates the truth and misses the point of monastic life: if we could speak to a medieval monk or nun and were to ask how they went about “saving civilization,” they would be quite bewildered! They preserved ancient culture not out of some sense cultural pride, and not primarily out of antiquarian interest. They were concerned for their souls and wanted the tools to study and teach God’s life-giving Word: the tradition of ancient Rome provided these tools, so they turned to it and made it their own. Anything they “saved” was saved not for its own sake: it was their own salvation that animated and directed their work! The cultural accomplishments of the monks might, in a sense, be taken as a witness to what Jesus says in Matthew 6:33, "But seek ye first the kingdom of God, and His righteousness; and all these things shall be added unto you."

 

We as teachers at Jackson Hole Classical Academy have no delusion that we can save western civilization. While we are, in our way, passing on knowledge of a tradition that ought not be forgotten, this handing-down is a peripheral concern at most. While a school is different from a monastery in most ways, we turn to the ancient tradition of classical learning like the monks and nuns did because it is proven to work, and because it provides, at its best, tools for human flourishing. And though we do seek to prepare young men and women to contribute meaningfully to “a flourishing and free society,” we seek this not directly, but through the formation of our students –– “to cultivate within our students the wisdom and virtue necessary to discover and fulfill their God-given potential.”

 

Latin, in short, sharpens the mind and opens for us the depths of a tradition to which we are, in many senses, the inheritors. As a Christian classical school, we study it not because we are antiquarians or because we are fighting to preserve the some endangered past but because, ultimately, Latin –– like the tradition of classical education at large –– has proven to be a fitting and beneficial object of study for a being created in God’s image. 

 

Sincerely,

 

Dr. Joseph Rudolph