for man is a giddy thing (Much Ado V.4.106)

 At the close of William Shakespeare's play, Much Ado About Nothing, one of the main characters, Benedick, who has throughout the play been opposed to marriage but has been converted by the trickery and machinations of his friends, speaks the conclusion to the play and utters this phrase: 

In brief, since I do purpose to marry, I will think nothing to any purpose that the world can say against it; and therefore never flout at me for what I have said against it, for man is a giddy thing, and this is my conclusion. (Much Ado, V.4.103-106)

Man is a giddy thing. A dictionary entry defines the adjective giddy as "having a sensation of whirling and a tendency to fall or stagger; dizzy" (https://languages.oup.com/google-dictionary-en/). What is Shakespeare telling us when he has Benedick describe himself, but not just himself, in these terms? Here, I belie,ve is one of those Meta-Shakespeare quotes where the bard makes a statement that outside the context of the play has as much meaning as it does in context. 

For Benedick, his statement is part apology for his changed opinion on the state of marriage. Having stated at previous points in the play that he is "a professed tyrant to their sex" (I.1.160), that marriage is akin to thrusting "thy neck into a yoke" (I.1.191). At another point proclaiming that "I will live a bachelor" (I.1.234). He states that if ever he changes his mind, "let me be vilely painted, and in such great letters as they write 'Here is good horse to hire ... Here you may see Benedick the married man'" (I.1.251-254). 

Benedick's position is clear, yet his friend and lord, Don Pedro, proposes to unmask Benedick's false abhorrence of love and to knit his heart to Beatrice, who, while not being as forecful about never marrying anyone, clearly has a complicated relationship with Benedick. It appears that the two were involved at some level previously. Early in the play, Beatrice remarks that "You [Benedick] always end with a Jade's trick. I know you of old" (I.1.138). Later, after the masquerade ball in which Beatrice spoke harshly to Benedick (whether she knew it was him or not is a matter of debate), Don Pedro tells her "you have lost the heart of Signor Benedick." She replies, "Indeed, my lord, he lent it me awhile, and I gave him use for it - a double heart for his single one. Marry, once before he won it of me with false dice; therefore your grace may well say I have lost it" (II.1.261-266). 

Don Pedro and others devise a plan to make Benedick and Beatrice believe that the other secretly loves them, thus bringing "Signor Benedick and Lady Beatrice into a mountain of affection th' one with th' other" (II.1.346). 

It is this trick played out that changes the heart of Benedick and Beatrice both and gives them leave to love each other. The conclusion to this is that after promising to marry each other, Benedick must explain his previous behavior. Man is a giddy thing. Man is changeable. Man is not surefooted on this earth. Man can change his mind and must when circumstances insist. "When I said I would die a bachelor, I did not think I should live till I were married" (II.3.230), Benedick states when first his mind is altered to new possibilities. 

When all else has been accomplished and he and Beatrice are forced to see themselves rightly, Benedick's best explanation for the change in himself is that "Man is a giddy thing." 

Meta-Shakespeare

 I've got a daughter in Classical Conversations doing Challenge III this year. That means we'll be studying Shakespeare. I've got five plays lined up to study with her and am already done with Much Ado About Nothing. I had a conversation with my wife while reading Much Ado and thought it would make an interesting study. There are many instances in Shakespeare's plays when he has a line that appears to be universally true, even out of context for the play; think "All the world's a stage" As You Like It 2.7.139. This line says something that is to be understood as true outside the play as well as inside the play. He is making a reality claim, or a meta-claim, if you will. I am facinated by these lines and asked my wife if the current consensus on Shakespeare was that these were intentional not. She felt they were intentional and I like the idea of that. There are times when the poet / playwright speaks to the crowd in unobscured statements about the nature of reality and personal relationships. 

I'm going to study these moments this year with my daughter reading Much Ado About Nothing, Julius Caesar, Macbeth, Henry V, and Hamlet. I will post these Meta-Shakepeare ponderings and what I think they mean as we go. Stick around. 

Some quotes from Abolition of Man

For every one pupil who needs to be guarded from a weak excess of sensibility there are three who need to be awakened from the slumber of cold vulgarity. The task of the modern educator is not to cut down jungles but to irrigate deserts. The right defense against false sentiments is to inculcate just sentiments. (27)

ordo amoris, the ordinate condition of the affections in which every object is accorded that kind and degree of love which is appropriate to it. (28-29)

Aristotle says that the aim of education is to make the pupil like and dislike what he ought. (29, Aristotle, Nic. Eth. 1104B)

The heart never takes the place of the head, but it can, and should, obey it.

In battle it is not syllogisms that will keep the reluctant nerves and muscles to their post in the third hour of the bombardment. The crudest sentimentalism ... about a flag or a country or a regiment will be of more use. (35)

Their scepticism about values is on the surface: it is for use on other people's values: about the values current in their own set they are not nearly sceptical enough. (43)

I will not insist on the point that Instinct is a name for we know not what (to say that migratory birds find their way by instinct is only to say that we do not know how migratory birds find their way), for I think it is here being used in a fairly definite sense, to mean an unreflective or spontaneous impulse widely felt by the members of a given species. (46-47)

If nothing is self-evident, nothing can be proved. (55)

if nothing is obligatory for its own sake, nothing is obligatory at all. (55)

A dogmatic belief in objective value is necessary to the very idea of a rule which is not tyranny or an obedience which is not slavery. (81)

For the wise men of old the cardinal problem had been how to conform the soul to reality, and the solution had been knowledge, self-discipline, and virtue. For magic and applied science alike the problem is how to subdue reality to the wishes of men: the solution is a technique; and both, in the practice of this technique are ready to do things hitherto regarded as disgusting and impious - such as digging up and mutilating the dead. (83-84)

Orthodoxy and Blasphemy

"[E]very orthodoxy protects its sacred things with blasphemy laws. Because our culture likes to keep up its secularist pretense, we do not use the term othodoxy or blasphemy. But we do have politically correct thought, and we do have laws against hate speech."
Douglas Wilson, A Serrated Edge, 22

Ideas Have Consequences

"It will not suffice to point out the inventions and processes of our century unless it can be shown that they are something other than a splendid efflorescence of decay" (12)

"The whole tendency of modern thought, one might say its whole moral impulse, is to keep the individual busy with endless induction." (12)

"The unexpressed assumption of empiricism is that experience will tell us what we are experiencing." (13)

"A great material establishment, by its very temptation to luxuriousness, unfits the owner for the labor necessary to maintain it, as has been observed countless times in the histories and of nations." (15)

"Civilization has been an intermittent phenomenon; to this truth we have allowed ourselves to be blinded by the insolence of material success." (17)

The Grotesque in Fiction

In the greatest fiction, the writer's moral sense coincides with his dramatic sense, and I see no way for it to do this unless his moral judgment is part of the very act of seeing, and he is free to use it. I have heard it said that belief in Christian dogma is a hindrance to the writer, but I myself have found nothing further from the truth. Actually, it frees the storyteller to observe. It is not a set of rules which fixes what he sees in the world. It affects his writing primarily by guaranteeing his respect for mystery.
In the introduction to a collection of his stories called Rotting Hill, Wyndham Lewis has written, "If I write about a hill what is rotting, it is because I despise rot." The general accusation passed against writers now is that they write about rot because they love it. Some do, and their works may betray them, but it is impossible not to believe that some write about rot because they see it for what it is.
Flannery O'Connor, "The Fiction Writer & His Country" in Mystery and Manners: Occasional Prose, 31.

The Trouble with Socialism

"The trouble with Socialism is that you eventually run out of other people's money."
Margaret Thatcher, former British Prime Minister.

Wisdom from Chesterton

Many clever men like you have trusted in civilization. Many clever Babylonians, many clever Egyptians, many clever men at the end of Rome. Can you tell me, in a world that is flagrant with the failures of civilization, what there is particularly immortal about yours?
The Napoleon of Notting Hill

On Regional Writing, by Flannery O'Connor

The best American fiction has always been regional. The ascendancy passed roughly from New England to the Midwest to the South; it has passed to and stayed longest wherever there has been a shared past, a sense of alikeness, and the possibility of reading a small history in a universal light. In these things the South still has a degree of advantage. It is a slight degree and getting slighter, but it is a degree of kind as well as of intensity, and it is enough to feed good literature if our people - whether they be newcomers or have roots here - are enough aware of it to foster its growth in themselves.
Every serious writer will put his finger on it at a slightly different spot but in the same region of sensitivity. When Walker Percy won the National Book Award, newsmen asked him why there were so many good Southern writers and he said, "Because we lost the War." He didn't mean by that simply that a lost war makes good subject matter. What he was saying was that we have had our Fall. We have gone into the modern world with an inburnt knowledge of human limitations and with a sense of mystery which could not have developed in our first state of innocence - as it has not sufficiently developed in the rest of the country.
Not every lost war would have this effect on every society, but we were doubly blessed, not only in our Fall, but in having means to interpret it. Behind our own history, deepening it at every point, has been another history. Mencken called the South the Bible Belt, in scorn and thus in incredible innocence. In the South we have, in however attenuated form a form, a vision of Moses' face as he pulverized our idols. This knowledge is what makes the Georgia writer different from the writer from Hollywood or New York. It is the knowledge that the novelist finds in his community. When he ceases to find it there, he will cease to write, or at least he will cease to write anything enduring. The writer operates at a peculiar crossroads where time and place and eternity somehow meet. His problem is to find that location.

From "The Regional Writer" in Flannery O'Connor, Mystery and Manners: Occasional Prose, 58-59.

Davidson on economic stability

The secret of Charleston's stability, if it was any secret, was only the old Southern principle that material considerations, however important, are means not ends, and should always be subdued to the ends they are supposed to serve, should never be allowed to dominate, never be mistaken for ends in themselves. If they are mistaken for ends, they dominate everything, and then you get instability. You get he average modern city, you get New York and Detroit, you get industrial civilization, world wars, Marxist communism, the New Deal.

Donald Davidson, "Some Day, In Old Charleston" Still Rebels, Still Yankees, 222.

Guy Fawkes Day

Remember, remember the Fifth of November,
The Gunpowder Treason, and Plot,
I can think of no reason
Why the Gunpowder Treason
Should ever be forgot.

Happy Guy Fawkes Day!

Classical Thought for the Day

"The beauty of the classical curriculum is that it dwells on one problem, one author, or one epoch long enough to allow even the youngest student a chance to exercise his mind in a scholarly way: to make connections and to trace developments, lines of reasoning, patterns of action, recurring symbolisms, plots, and motifs." David V. Hicks, Norms and Nobility, 133.

The Good School

"The good school does not just offer what the student or the parent or the state desires, but it says something about what these three ought to desire. A school is fundamentaly a normative, not a utilitarian, institution, governed by the wise, not by the many."
David V. Hicks, Norms and Nobility, 13.

Eliot on Tradition

From T.S. Eliot's "Tradition and the Individual Talent"

Yet if the only form of tradition, of handing down, consisted in following the ways of the immediate generation before us in a blind or timid adherence to its successes, "tradition" should positively be discouraged. We have seen many such simple currents soon lost in the sand; and novelty is better than repetition. Tradition is a matter of much wider significance. It cannot be inherited, and if you want it you must obtain it by great labour. It involves, in the first place, the historical sense, which we may call nearly indispensable to anyone who would continue to be a poet beyond his twenty-fifth year; and the historical sense involves a perception, not only of the pastness of the past, but of its presence; the historical sense compels a man to write not merely with his own generation in his bones, but with a feeling that the whole of the literature of Europe from Homer and within it the whole of the literature of his own country has a simultaneous existence and composes a simultaneous order. This historical sense, which is a sense of the timeless as well as of the temporal and of the timeless and of the temporal together, is what makes a writer traditional. And it is at the same time what makes a writer most acutely conscious of his place in time, of his contemporaneity.

Milton on Education

“The end then of learning is to repair the ruins of our first parents by regaining to know God aright, and out of that knowledge to love him, to imitate him, to be like him, as we may the nearest by possessing our souls of true virtue, which being united to the heavenly grace of faith makes up the highest perfection.” John Milton, Of Education
Milton’s words are powerful. They presuppose something very important. They presuppose, in their very statement, that repair work has to be done. We can go through the litany of problems with modern education, but we don’t have to to see where Milton is coming from. You see, Milton does not locate the problem of education in the newest curricular fad, multicultural program, or pro-homosexual textbook selection. Milton locates the problem systemic in education exactly where it is, the fall. The goal of education, according to Milton, is to repair the ruins of the fall. To bring us back into wonderful, blissful communion with our heavenly Father and the glory of His only-begotten son, Christ, our Lord. Not that we reverse the fall through education, but that we seek to suppress it. We seek, through knowing God aright, through loving Him in knowledge, through imitation of His divine attributes, “to be like Him … by possessing our souls of true virtue.” That is the goal of a classical and Christian education.

Wisdom for Teachers

"It is the teacher's mission to stand at the impassable gateways of young souls, a wiser and stronger soul than they, serving as a herald of science, a guide through nature, to summon the faculties within to their work, to place before them the facts to be observed, and to guide to the paths to be trodden. It is his by sympathy, by example, and by every means of influence - by objects for the senses, by facts for the intelligence, by pictures for the imagination, by stories for the fancy and the heart, to excite the minds, stir the curiosity, stimulate the thoughts, and send them forth as arriors, armed and eager for the conflict."
John Milton Gregory "The Seven Laws of Teaching" (1886)

Belloc on our Civil Religion

Hilarie Belloc (1870-1953) understood what Rousseau was trying to say about civil religion in the Social Contract. This quote from his essay "The Modern Man" explains it very well.

You may deny any one of the old doctrines and few will be shocked, but you may not ridicule the flag or the Crown, not interrupt the two minutes' silence on Armistice Day....

Rousseau argued that rather than have any transcendental religion, such as Christianity, we must find unity, or uniformity, in our religion of state, or civil religion. The elements of this civil religion are flags and national holidays. Imagine how right Belloc is when you think of the fourth of July versus the feast of Ascension or some other religious festival. Despite lapel pin campaigns to remember that "Jesus is the reason for the Season," we have excised much of the Christian aspects of Christmas from any and all public displays of the celebration. Now imagine that instead of Armistice Day, a day I never heard of celebrating until recently (apparently we don't think much of World War 1 in America), we ignored or interrupted 9/11 celebrations. Which would get you in more trouble politically or socially?

We have a civil religion in our country and it doesn't reflect much of a Christian character. God help us train the next generation to pay more attention to the transcendental and eternal things than just be flag wavers and public holiday devotees.

Culture

Many of us are aware of Henry Van Til's classic formulation in The Calvinistic Concept of Culture.
that culture is religion externalized. It turns out he was not the first to make such a suggestion, though he was the first that I know of to explore it from a purely Reformed and theological perspective. In 1930, the Agrarians made this statement concerning culture.

the whole way in which we live, act, think, and feel. It is a kind of imaginatively balanced life lived out in a definite social tradition.

They were defining humanism as a culture, something we have still not really caught on to as clearly as we ought to.
I am constantly amazed at how right they were about so much.

Thanks to Dr. Grant for this quote

“If the church of Jesus Christ does not become central to the life of growing cities then the cities will become mere geographies of no singular place.” Thomas Chalmers

Still more wisdom from Chesterton

Fairy-tales do not give a child his first idea of bogy. What fairy-tales give the child is his first clear idea of the possible defeat of bogy. The baby has known the dragon intimately ever since he had an imagination. What the fairy-tale provides for him is a St. George to kill the dragon.
Exactly what the fairy-tale does is this: it accustoms him by a series of clear pictures to the idea that these limitless terrors have a limit, that these shapeless enemies have enemies, that these infinite enemies of man have enemies in the knights of God, that there is something in the universe more mystical than darkness, and stronger than strong fear. When I was a child I have stared at the darkness until the whole black bulk of it turned into one negro giant taller than heaven. If there was one star in the sky it only made him a Cyclops. But fairy-tales restored my mental health. For next day I read an authentic account of how a negro giant with one eye, of quite equal dimensions, had been baffled by a little boy like myself (of similar inexperience and even lower social status) by means of a sword, some bad riddles, and a brave heart.
Tremendous Trifles