Common Core Undermines the Search for Beauty
This semester at Thales College, I am teaching a survey course focusing on literature, most of it English poetry, from the Renaissance to the 20th century. I have two auditors in the class. One of them is still in high school, taught at home, and he, as I have been used for 30 years in homeschoolers, beams with delight at all that he finds well done or wondrous, and since our first authors have been Shakespeare, Herbert, and Milton, there have been many opportunities for wonder. The other is a Thales student whom I have had in another class, who is sitting in this one for the most obvious reason, which is that he wants to learn things. These auditors never miss a single class, they are obviously doing all the reading (right now, that means the entirety of Paradise Lost), and they participate as fully as the others do.
I have never had that experience before. But the most surprising thing is simply that this should be a surprise. Let me explain.
Suppose you were to wake up one sunny day and find yourself in the Piazza di San Marco, in Venice. The golden-domed cathedral stands before you, with open doors. No one stands guard. Thousands of pigeons are gathered on the pavement, cooing and pecking about, and from a side alley far off you hear what sounds like a street singer, playing on a mandolin. In the air is the faint sharp smell of the sea.
Do you not think you would get up, and go into the church, where you may find some of the most brilliant and mysterious mosaic art that man has ever crafted? Or stand gazing up at the bell tower in its gleaming white marble? Or find that singer with the mandolin? Or explore the winding streets, crossing by one small bridge or another the maze of canals, with their water lapping against the foundations of buildings that seem to be perched on the sea? Or would you bury your head in the latest issue of The International Tribune, to follow the interminable labyrinth of the politics of your nation, whichever that happens to be? And this, which you are free to do at any time, begins like mold to spread its fur over your entire brain, so that even if you were face to face with magnificence, you would not so much as raise your eyes.
The great heritage of English literature is right here, a few feet away, but it seems that for most of our teachers in the public schools, and in many a private school also, it may as well be in an alternate universe. When it came to literature, the Common Core was well-named in one regard. It kept the inedible core of the apple and threw the fruit away. Its view of English was utilitarian in the extreme; hence its focus on “informational texts,” which meant, in practice, political editorials masking as reportage. It sliced and diced a few genuinely great literary works into convenient little pieces, and its dismissed almost all poetry, and most especially poetry written before 1900, which could not be dragooned into utilitarian or political service.
But what the Core really did was to give us a clear picture of what the schools were already doing to literature, because, apart from any political use to which it might be put, many of our English teachers do not actually like English literature, and most of the rest are not well-versed in it. Their students pick up on the disdain or the indifference and bring it with them into college. There they are likeliest to fall in love with that literature if they happen upon some oddball in the English department, despised or mistrusted by his or her colleagues, or if they avoid the department entirely and happen to pick up a book of old poetry someday and read it.
And this consideration brings me back to Paradise Lost. Milton takes for granted that all rational beings are attracted by beauty, and that whenever they have the chance, unless they are given over to sloth, they will want, as even the devils in hell want, “to raise magnificence.” It is true that the great hall the devils build in hell, Pandemonium (Milton’s coinage, that), is overwrought, and is meant in part to satirize something like St. Peter’s Basilica, but the problem is not the desire to create something of beauty and wonder, but the disjunction of that desire from spiritual insight and goodness. Thus Pandemonium, for all its flash and its naphthalene light and its immense interior space, is a place where almost all the devils themselves must be humiliated, “reduced to smallest forms,” if they would walk at large within. But the blissful bower that is the inner abode of Adam and Eve, a bower prepared by the hand of God, is like a small cathedral of nature in its walls and its roof and its floor of many colors:
It was a place
Chosen by the sovereign Planter, when he framed
All things to man’s delightful use; the roof
Of thickest covert was inwoven shade
Laurel and myrtle, and what higher grew
Of limb or fragrant leaf; on either side
Acanthus, and each odorous bushy shrub
Fenced up the verdant wall; each beauteous flower,
Iris all hues, roses, and jessamine
Reared high their flourished heads between, and wrought
Mosaic; underfoot the violet,
Crocus, and hyacinth with rich inlay
Broidered the ground, more colored than with stone
Of costliest emblem; other creature here,
Beast, bird, insect, or worm, durst enter none,
Such was their awe of man.
This beauty is not something merely to consume, as a list-checking tourist might. It enters and forms the soul. Here is Eve, conversing at ease with Adam as evening falls. Her words are a kind of spontaneous poem, a love song that extends to all the world, but that places all the world as not so beloved as the man at whose side she reclines:
Conversing with thee I forget all times;
All seasons and their change, all please alike.
Sweet is the breath of morn when he ascends
With charm of earliest birds; pleasant the sun
When first on this delightful land he spreads
His orient beam, on herb, tree, fruit, and flower
Glistering with dew; fragrant the fertile earth
After soft showers, and sweet the coming on
Of grateful evening mild, and silent night
With this her solemn bird, and this fair moon,
And these the gems of heaven, her starry train;
But neither breath of morn when he ascends
With charm of earliest birds, nor rising sun
On this delightful land, nor herb, fruit, flower
Glistering with dew, nor fragrance after showers,
Nor grateful evening mild, nor silent night
With this her solemn bird, nor walk by moon
Or glittering starlight without thee is sweet.
If you ask, “What is the value in reading such a work as Paradise Lost?”, I might reply by mentioning that Milton opens up the mind to many of the most influential and powerful poets and men of letters in the centuries to come: Pope, Blake, Shelley, Byron, Goethe, Melville, and many more. I might also mention that Milton sheds light backward also upon the many authors and artists whose work he revisits: Homer and Virgil and all the great poets of ancient Greece and Rome; Augustine and John Chrysostom and the Church Fathers; philosophers from Plato to the schoolmen to the Platonists of his own beloved Cambridge; to read Milton closely is to bring into play 2,000 years of learning and artistic achievement, with a guide whose mind was highly original and whose engagement with his predecessors was organic and active, not mechanical or passive.
I could say these things, and they still would miss the main point, one which I ardently hope my students will grasp, and I will do all I can to help them. The splendor of a work of titanic artistic and intellectual achievement is its own justification, not only as something to enjoy, but as something to encounter, sometimes even with awe, as it works toward forming the soul. Many a Venice is at hand. Our young people need only set aside the distractions, and find someone who can take them there.
READ MORE from Anthony Esolen:
The post Common Core Undermines the Search for Beauty appeared first on The American Spectator | USA News and Politics.