New Humanists

Send us Fan Mail In his essay "On Educating Children," a follow-up to his denunciation of pedantry, Michel de Montaigne warns that "natural affection makes parents too soft" and incapable of properly disciplining their children, or even of letting their children take the risks and encounter the dangers they ought to. Book-learning, in Montaigne's essay, takes a backseat to...

Send us Fan Mail When Tim Griffith was coaching soccer and reading ancient Roman rhetorical theory, he realized he had stumbled across a pedagogical goldmine. In this episode, Jonathan and Ryan talk with Tim about raising kids as native Latin speakers, the roles that comprehensible input vs. grammar instruction play in the language classroom, prescriptive versus descriptive grammar, and Roman rhet...

Send us Fan Mail We threw off the monarchy... now what? Having established a republic on American soil, the Founding Fathers were faced with the question of how to educate a new generation of people who would protect American liberty. The most underrated of the Founding Fathers, Dr. Benjamin Rush, devoted considerable time and attention to this question. In this episode, Jonathan and Ryan are join...

Send us Fan Mail Leonardo Bruni was the titan of Renaissance historians and a prolific humanist. In a long letter to an aristocratic Italian woman, Battista Malatesta, he lays out his philosophy of humanistic education, which is meant to help the student achieve glory. But laziness or ineptitude, he says, threatens the student always, and will drag her down to crawl alongside other mediocrities. B...

Send us Fan Mail Michel de Montaigne was a native Latin speaker in modern Europe and yet a great innovator in French letters; among other things, he invited the genre known as the essay. His elegant, searching essays are intended to expose the reality of his own soul - and that of his readers. In "On Schoolmasters' Learning," this most studios of men wonders aloud whether education...

Send us Fan Mail Aeneas Silvius was an accomplished Renaissance humanist, author of erotic literature, and influential aide to emperors and popes (and an antipope). Then, he became a pope himself. As Pope Pius II, he then added memoirist, urban planner, and antiquarian to his list of accomplishments. He contributed to the popular Renaissance "mirror of princes" genre in a letter to a you...

Send us Fan Mail Jonathan and Ryan turn to a set of selections from the Prince of Humanists himself, Desiderius Erasmus. In Liber Antibarbarorum, Erasmus pillories the precious Christians who refuse to read pagan authors on account of their own squeamish consciences. In Education of a Christian Prince, and On the Education of Children, Erasmus gives principled arguments for humanistic education an...

Send us Fan Mail "As only the Catholic and communist know, all education must be ultimately religious education." So argues T.S. Eliot in his essay "Modern Education and the Classics," in which he contrasts three different camps in the world of education: the radical, the liberal, and the orthodox. Eliot seems to say that the only hope for continued erudition in the Greek and R...

Send us Fan Mail In The Greek State, Friedrich Nietzsche argues that the Greek polis existed in order to hold the many in slavery so that the Olympian few could give birth to the beautiful Helen known as Greek culture, and that the Greek state had to be periodically renewed by war so that it could continue to create geniuses. This, he says, is the esoteric meaning behind Plato's Republic. Jon...

Send us Fan Mail Why was it that the Greeks, the most humane of all peoples, also possessed such a tigerish lust for blood? Why did the Greeks so delight in Homer's depiction of cruelty and death in the Iliad? That is the question animating Friedrich Nietzsche's preface to an unwritten book, "Homer's Contest." Nietzsche turns to the dark Hellenic past, the "womb of Ho...

Send us Fan Mail Thomas Elyot wrote "The Boke named the Governour," the first book about education written in the English language, an outstanding example in the crowded field of Renaissance-era mirrors for princes. The mirrors for princes were works designed to instruct and train future kings, nobles, and leading men. Machiavelli and Erasmus wrote famous mirrors for princes, but what do...

Send us Fan Mail "Simple necessity has forced men, even among the heathen, to maintain pedagogues and schoomasters if their nation was to be brought to a high standard." In his address "To the Councilmen of All Cities in Germany," Martin Luther exhorts Germany's civic leaders to establish public schools for the education of all German children. Foremost among his prioritie...

Send us Fan Mail Ulrich Zwingli was one of the towering figures of the Reformation, a committed humanist, and a warrior who ultimately fell in battle. He despised the idea that Christianity could render men passive, and in a short treatise from 1523 to a young nobleman, he sketches the outlines of his ideal education for the creature called man: "We are set between the hammer and the anvil, h...

Send us Fan Mail In the opening lecture of his course on Homer, the Professor of Greek at the University of Wittenberg, Phillip Melanchthon, first invokes the aid of the gods and declares that to Homer belongs "the highest and noblest place." Further, Melanchthon proclaims that Homer "alone snatches away the palm of victory from all poets that any age has brought forth, and he leave...

Send us Fan Mail A stern prophet of the new and harsh doctrine of predestination. A bloodthirsty tyrant burning people at the stake. A narrowminded dour Puritan. The magnitude of the popularity of these Calvinist stereotypes is matched by their massive distance from the truth of the man. In his affection for the pagan authors, Calvin reveals a deeply humanistic soul, attuned to truth no matter whi...

Send us Fan Mail How do you prepare a royal princess for the throne? In this episode, we look at the writings of two giants of Reformation humanism: Johannes Sturm and Roger Ascham, and in particular, their correspondence about Ascham's work training the future Queen Elizabeth I in Latin and Greek. Ascham himself variously tutored and served as Latin secretary to Lady Jane Grey, the woman who...

Send us Fan Mail King Tarquinius secures his hold on power by expanding the Senate, but encounters a roadblock to strengthening the military in the person of a famous augur. Tarquinius is ruthless, productive, and the first great Roman promoter of "bread and circuses" (among other things, according to Livy, Tarquinius builds the Circus Maximus). Despite his political saavy, however, he c...

Send us Fan Mail Strange omens, plague, occult religious rites. King Tullus Hostilius' reign collapses in something like supernatural madness. The great Ancus Marcius takes over, but is finally deceived by a rich, mysterious newcomer to Rome: Lucius Tarquinius Priscus. Join Jonathan and Ryan as they outline how the first of the Tarquins takes the throne after first disinheriting his own nephe...

Send us Fan Mail Lysander is a troubling figure. As a child, he was a charity case who excelled his more affluent peers; he never cared for wealth, and yet overlooked the rapaciousness of his friends, allowing money and luxury into Sparta, corrupting it. He liberated the Greek world from the yoke of Athenian imperialism, but then installed oligarchic juntas to rule with an iron fist. He conquered...

Send us Fan Mail In his wise and humane Didascalicon, the teacher, canon regular, and mystical theologian Hugh of St. Victor lays out his advice and instructions for teachers and students engaged in liberal study. The heir of centuries of thought in Christendom on the liberal arts, Hugh and his contemporaries were on the precipice of a revolution--the western rediscovery of Aristotle and the subse...

Send us Fan Mail Does Plato, and philosophy more generally, belong in schools? In a lecture, professor and Davenant Institute VP Colin Redemer suggests that Plato is too dangerous to be allowed into classical schools. Jonathan and Ryan take a look at this lecture and at the response it received, focusing on esoteric writing, reason versus revelation, and the Platonic-Christian-American synthesis....

Send us Fan Mail Irving Babbitt was the architect of New Humanism. He was also T.S. Eliot's mentor at Harvard. But in 1928, the newly Anglican Eliot's essay criticizing his old mentor's humanistic project was published, which provoked a terse, and sharp, rebuke from Babbitt. What is the relationship between traditional religion and humanistic learning? Can humanism provide society w...

Send us Fan Mail The duel between the Horatii brothers and the Curiatii brothers seemed to settle the Roman-Alban dispute and give Rome authority over Alba. But wily Mettius Fufetius has a trick or two up his sleeve. Meanwhile, the one surviving Horatius brother strikes down his sister in cold blood, an incident Jacques-Louis David drew but never ended up painting. The civilized three-on-three due...

Send us Fan Mail After the long peace of Numa's reign, Rome gets a new king, even more ferocious than Romulus: Tullus Hostilius. As soon as he comes to power, he begins looking for a way to start a war (while keeping a good conscience about it). This is the fifth episode of "No Republic Was Ever Greater," a podcast series examining the rise of the Roman Empire through the work of Li...

Send us Fan Mail Abraham Lincoln spent less than 1 year of his life going to school. Nevertheless, he became a lawyer, a surveyor, and one of the greatest statesmen in American history. He also carried on correspondence with one of the country's leading Shakespearean actors about the relative merits of different plays and speeches in Shakespeare's dramatic oeuvre. In no speech is the sel...