Not at all trivial

I know the subject brings mostly horrors to most people's minds, but I am beginning to think, or at least postulate, that the key to re-inventing western civilization is the restoration of grammar.

Knowing how to say something is as important as what you say.

Is this a maxim that can be proved using the traditional methods? I haven't tried, but it is a suspicion that is growing in my mind into what looks as if it may become a conviction.

In 1935, Sr. Miriam Joseph Rauh heard a lecture by the great Mortimer Adler at St. Mary's College titled "The Metaphysical Basis of the Liberal Arts" in which he is recorded to have said, that college students of the day "know little or nothing about...the liberal arts."

Adler, it is said, "centred his discussion on the three arts of language, pointing out that whereas among the Greeks and Medievalists their integral unity and harmony was always recognized and preserved, since the fifteenth century specialization has contrived to separate them to the consequent deterioration and even the ruination of their educative function - to develop the power of the individual to read, write, and speak - in other words, to acquire mastery over the tools of learning."

(An aside here: we were discussing this weekend the general collapse of a Christian approach and interpretation to the classical authors that became known popularly as the 'Renaissance' when scholars seemed abruptly to have abandoned Christianity in favour of a new paganism. We speculated why this might have occurred and agreed that it would be an interesting spelunking task for an historian of philosophy to investigate what might have been the triggering events or developments. More than I or my friend is qualified to attempt, but someone out there might want to try.)

Sr. Miriam Joseph went on to finishe her Ph.D. at Columbia and became a disciple of Adler's re-classicizing movement that has led to so many restoration-like projects - Senior's Integrated Humanities Program at the University of Kansas and thence Clear Creek; TAC and its imitators ...

Sr. Miriam Joseph taught a course at St. Mary's College which became an institution and was a requirement for all undergraduates : the Trivium. It was designed to teach students how to think correctly,, read with intelligence, and speak and write clarly and effectively. Sister wrote the text, the book I have in front of me now, The Trivium, recently republished by Paul Dry books.

She also wrote about Shakespeare, answering the question, "why did he write so good?"

She answers that "the extraordinary power, vitality and richness of SHakespeare's language" are partly due to the "theory of composition then prevailing." That is, the classical theory based on the three arts of logic, grammar and rhetoric that make up the three liberal arts of language.

"It is this ...which accounts for those characteristics of Shakespeare's language which differentiate it most from the language of today..." A nice way of saying that since we are no longer taught in the classical manner, we can never produce another writer of that calibre. The best-educated among us us is a semi-literate savage. Is it any wonder that this savagery is showing itself more and more openly in our political and social structures?

"The difference," she continues, "in habits ofthought an din methods of developing thought results in a corresponding difference in expression principally because the Renaissance theory of composition, derived from the ancient tradition, was permeated with formal logic and rhetoric."

"While ours," she says bluntly, "is not."

We cannot think. Thinking is a prerequisite to writing and we can no longer manage the necessary preliminary tasks.

Correct this lack and western civiliation will almost restore itself.