Dorothy Sayers' Wisdom

"None of us feels the true love of God till we realize how wicked we are. But you can't teach people that - they have to learn by experience."

"The great advantage about telling the truth is that nobody ever believes it."

"A human being must have an occupation, if he or she is not to become a nuisance in the world."

"Death seems to provide the mind of the Anglo-Saxon race with a greater fund of amusement than any other single subject."

"As I grow older and older, and totter toward the tomb, I find that I care less and less who goes to bed with whom.



Related reading:  Dorothy Sayers The Lost Tools of Learning; Dorothy Sayers The Final Redemption of Cats

Dorothy Sayers: A Mind of Her Own

Alice C. Linsley

Dorothy Sayers’ writings reveal her to be one of the most politically and religiously unaccommodating women of the 20th century. She distained propaganda, saw through commercial advertizing, resisted trends, defended human dignity and argued for the integrity of the creative process.

Carl Olson writes, “In an age of skepticism, cynicism, and false ‘freedoms,’ Dorothy Sayers (1893-1957) was a passionate and occasionally scathing voice of reason. Like her friends C.S. Lewis, T.S. Eliot, and Charles Williams, Sayers was a brilliant Christian thinker, an Anglo-Catholic who took doctrine seriously and bristled at the growth of ‘fads, schisms, heresies, and anti-Christ’ within the Church of England.”

Sayers’ writings reveal her opposition to all careless regard for human dignity. Lord Peter is always delicate, even compassionate, in making inquiries of the broken-hearted and the scandalized. He must overcome his lordly pride in order to accept his beloved Harriet Vane on her own dignified terms. On the matter of life and death, Sayers takes the high road, opposing euthanasia on moral and religious grounds.

In those last weeks or hours of pain and unconsciousness, the soul may be undergoing some necessary part of its pilgrimage on earth. It isn’t our business to cut it short. Who are we to take life and death into our hands? ... the wrongness of the thing lies much more in the harm it does the killer than in anything it can do to the person who is killed. Especially, of course, if the killing is to the killer’s own advantage. (Unnatural Death)

Her mysteries, which at places offer rich catholic insight, nonetheless gave offense to both the catholic and the evangelical because she refused to fashion her characters as good High Churchmen or even as born-again Evangelicals.

Well-meaning readers who try to identify the writer with his characters or to excavate the author’s personality and opinions from his books are frequently astonished by the ferocious rudeness with which the author himself salutes these efforts at reabsorbing his work into himself. They are an assault upon the independence of his creatures, which he very properly resents. Painful misunderstandings of this kind may rive the foundations of social intercourse, and produce explosions which seem quite out of proportion to the apparent causes….

“I am sure Lord Peter will end up as a convinced Christian.’


“From what I know of him, nothing is more unlikely.”


“But as a Christian yourself, you must want him to be one.”


“He would be horribly embarrassed by any such suggestion.”


“But he’s far too intelligent and far too nice, not to be a Christian.”


“My dear lady, Peter is not the Ideal Man; he is an eighteenth-century Whig gentleman, born a little out of his time, and doubtful whether any claim to possess a soul is not a rather vulgar piece of presumption.”


“I am disappointed.’


“I’m afraid I can’t help that.”


(No; you shall not impose either your will or mine upon my creature. He is what he is, I will work no irrelevant miracles upon him, either for propaganda, or to curry favour, or to establish the consistency of my own principles. He exists I his own right and not to please you. Hands off.) (The Mind of the Maker)

Sayers was a deeply religion person, but not stuffy. She is well depicted in Mrs. Budge’s description of the affable and astute Miss Climpson, whose high church ways are a mystery to the Chapel-going Mrs. Budge:

“…you might find her up at the church. She often drops in there to say her prayers like. Not a respectful way to approach a place of worship to my mind…Popping in and out on a week-day, the same as if it was a friend’s house. And coming home from Communion as cheerful as anything and ready to laugh and make jokes. I don’t see as how we was meant to make an ordinary thing of religion that way – so disrespectful and nothing uplifting to the ‘art about it. But there! we all ‘as our failings, and Miss Climpson is a nice lady and that I must say, even if she is a Roaming Catholic or next door to one.”

Lord Peter thought that Roaming Catholic was rather an appropriate name for the more ultramontane section of the High Church party.” (Unnatural Death)

Finally, a sketch of Dorothy Sayers would not be complete without mentioning her thoughts on the arts and the necessity of human creativity. She wrote, “Man is never truly himself except when he is actively creating something.” She asserted this because she believed that humans share in the nature of the Creator.

The Church asserts that there is a Mind which made the universe, that He made it because He is the sort of Mind that takes pleasure in creation, and that if we want to know what the Mind of the Creator is, we must look at Christ. In Him, we shall discover a Mind that loved His own creation so completely that He became part of it, suffered with and for it, and made it a sharer in His own glory and a fellow-worker with Himself in the working out of His own design for it. (Creed and Chaos, Chapter 10)

Painters and patrons of the arts take the leading role in two of her novels: Five Red Herring and Thrones and Dominions, a book which Sayers never finished. In the first, a hot-headed and heavy-drinking Scottish painter is murdered and in the second the flirtatious wife of a patron of the arts is murdered.

In Five Red Herrings we read this description of a temperamental artist:

Graham pulled a piece of chalk from his pocket and set to work… The picture came up before their eyes with the conjuring quickness of a lightening sketch at the cinema- the burn, the trees, the bridge and a mass of bulging white cloud, so like the actual canvas Wimsey had seen on the easel that he was thoroughly startled.

You ought to be making a living by impersonations, Jock.”

That’s my trouble. Too versatile. Paint in everybody’s style, except my own. Worries the critics…But It’s fun. Look, here’s Gowan.”

He rubbed out the sketch and substituted a vivid chalk impression of one of Gowan’s characteristic compositions – a grim border-keep, a wide sweep of coast, a boat I the foreground, with muscular fishermen bending over their nets.

“Here’s Ferguson – one tree with decorative roots, one reflection of same in water – dim blue distance; in fact, general blues all over – one heap of stones to hold the composition up. Here’s Farren – view of the roofs of Kirkcudbright complete with Tolbooth, looking like Noah’s Ark built out of nursery bricks – vermilion, Naples yellow, ultramarine – sophisticated naïveté and no cast shadows. Waters – ‘none of these charlatans take the trouble to draw’ – bird’s-eye view of a stone-quarry with every bump identifiable – horse and cart violently foreshortened at the bottom, to show that he can do it. Bless you” – he slopped some beer on the counter and wiped the mess away with a ragged sleeve – “the whole bunch of them have only got one gift between them that I lack, and that’s the single eye, more’s the pity. They’re perfectly sincere, I’m not – that’s what makes the difference. I tell you, Wimsey, half those damned portraits people pay me for are caricatures – only the fools don’t know it.” (Five Red Herrings, Chapter 7)

In Thrones and Dominions, Laurence Harwell backs plays for a hobby while his wife, Rosamund', wants him to back a play by Claude Amery, her "pet poet." This, and Rosamund sitting for the amorous French painter Gaston Chapparelle, strains their marriage. Rosamund turns up murdered in the Harwells’ country estate and Lord Peter solves the mystery.

Sayers seemed to enjoy the demise of undisciplined artists and unfaithful artsy women. They represented people who gave the arts a bad name. Worse, in her thinking they embodied “a loose and sentimental theology” that “begets loose and sentimental art-forms.” (The Man Born to Be King: A Play Cycle on the Life of Our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ)

Dorothy Sayers' Last Morning in Oxford

LAST MORNING IN OXFORD
Dorothy L. Sayers

The great poets . . . . are not at the pains of devising careful endings. Thus, Homer ends with lines that might as well be in the middle of a passage." -- H. Belloc.

I do not think that very much was said
Of solemn requiem for the good years dead.

Like Homer, with no thunderous rhapsody,
I closed the volume of my Odyssey.

The thing that I remember most of all
Is the white hemlock by the garden wall.

June 23rd, 1915.

From here.


Related reading: Dorothy Sayers' The Lost Tools of Learning; Response to Sayer's Lost Tools of Learning; More on Sayers and Classical Education

Jesus' Attitude Toward Women

The following is an excerpt from Dorothy Sayers' essay "The Human-Not-Quite-Human" which appears in a book titled Are Women Human? (Eerdmans Publishing Co., 1984).

I think I have never heard a sermon preached on the story of Martha and Mary that did not attempt, somehow, somewhere, to explain away its text. Mary's, of course, was the better part -the Lord said so, and we must not precisely contradict Him. But we will be careful not to despise Martha. No doubt, He approved of her too. We could not get on without her, and indeed (having paid lip-service to God's opinion) we must admit that we greatly prefer her. For Martha was doing a really feminine job, whereas Mary was just behaving like any other disiple, male or female; and that is a hard pill to swallow.

Perhaps it is no wonder that the women were first at the Cradle and last at the Cross. They had never known a man like this Man - there never has been such another. A prophet and teacher who never nagged at them, never flattered or coaxed or patronized; who never made arch jokes about them, never treated them either as "The women, God help us!" or "The ladies, God bless them!"; who rebuked without querulousness and praised without condescension; who took their questions and arguments seriously; who never mapped out their sphere for them, never urged them to be feminine or jeered at them for being female; who had no axe to grind and no uneasy male dignity to defend; who took them as he found them and was completely unself-conscious. There is no act, no sermon, no parable in the whole Gospel that borrows its pungency from female perversity; nobody could possibly guess from the words and deeds of Jesus that there was anything 'funny' about woman's nature.

More on Sayers and Classical Education

In her "Lost Tools of Learning," Dorothy Sayers describes what it means to be classically educated. The following essay discusses some of the forms of "classical" education found today in the USA. It is apparent that the designation "classical" can be employed in ways that definitely as not. This essays appears at the website of Logos School Materials.


What is Classical Education?

The resurgence of classical education over the last decade has been heartening in many respects, but some aspects of it are a bit confusing. No one holds the copyright on the word classical, and given the nature of the word, there has been something of a scramble in the various manifestations of classical education. This is not surprising, especially in a time when classical can refer to a ’57 Chevy, an original cola formula, the early Beach Boys, or a classic rock radio station.

Within the field of education, the word classical has a number of legitimate applications and a few spurious ones. There is the democratic classicism promoted by Mortimer Adler. There is the elite classicism of the well-established wealthy prep schools. We also see the classical approach advocated by David Hicks, which has been called “moral classicism.” And then there is the classicism argued for in these pages and practiced in the Association of Classical and Christian Schools (ACCS) schools. Among these contenders for the term, the one thing necessary is care in definition. These various schools of thought should not fight for the glory of sole possession, but rather argue in such a way that what everyone means is clear. Put another way, every form of classicism should be able to agree on the importance of early definition of terms in any discussion or debate.

But, unfortunately, because the world is the messy kind of place it is and because America is the kind of place it is, we should also expect to find various knock-offs and counterfeits. One common practice is simply to take whatever the school was already doing and simply call it classical.

Another less-than-adequate approach introduces just enough of a classical touch (one elective, say, on Latin word origins) to persuade inquiring parents that a classical education is being provided. In the long run, it is not necessary to engage such practices in debate, for, as Cicero would have said (had he thought of it), the proof is in the pudding.

In their survey of the classical school resurgence, Gene Veith and Andrew Kern provide the valuable service of identifying differences and similarities in the various legitimate classical approaches. For example, they compare the classical Christian approach with the democratic classicism advocated by Adler.

There are significant differences between the ACCS and the Paideia schools. ACCS questions the validity of state schooling; by contrast, the Paideia proposal is specifically geared to the reform of public schools. Religion is foundational to the ACCS curriculum, and Christianity is the point of integration through which all knowledge is made complete. Paideia does not dismiss the importance of religion, but its approach is more secular, and its foundational value is democracy. If the approach of ACCS can be described as Christian classicism, Paideia’s can best be described as democratic classicism.1

Various aspects of this proposal have already been discussed in earlier chapters. Here it is only important to point out that the Paideia proposal, as a great books program, is a legitimately classical approach to education. But for classical Christian educators, “classical” is not enough. We want our schools to be thoroughly and rigorously Christian as well.

Then there is elite classicism. For one example, Thomas Jefferson School in St. Louis offers a rigorous elite education. But is it classical? On one of their brochures they answer the question this way: The term “classical” implies different things to different people. The subjects we teach and the works we include in our syllabi are, for the most part, time-tested and acknowledged as important by most educated people and by American colleges. But the material, or the approach to it, may in some cases be as new as the current year. An English class may study Maya Angelou alongside Shakespeare. In biology class, the student will not only gain a knowledge of anatomy, accumulated over centuries, but will also learn about the latest advances in knowledge of the human genome. A student reading the Odyssey in Greek will not only be sharing an experience that goes back 2,500 years but will also be viewing Odysseus and his adventures through the eyes of a 21st-century citizen. We leave it to each reader to decide whether our program fits his or her own definition of a classical education.2

Not only is the education rigorous, but the classical and time-tested aspects of the curriculum are mixed in an eclectic way with more modern elements—Maya Angelou alongside Shakespeare. Of course, some might say this is not a mixture of modern and ancient, but rather a mixture of the time-tested and the trendy.

Still, the parents of students enrolled in such academies are paying, ahem, significant amounts in tuition, and they are not doing this in order to get illiterate kids back. The standards are clearly very high. But at the same time, the standards are high because of the social position of the families of the students and the social position of the school. In the other classical academies the standards are high because the schools are trying to recapture something, take something back. With some of the more well-heeled, established schools the standards are high because the schools inherited such standards.

Veith and Kern point to another classical approach, which might be called moral classicism. The leader in this movement is David Hicks. In his book Norms and Nobility he sets out his approach to education. Veith and Kern discuss Adler’s Paideia proposal, the ACCS approach, and the Hicks approach. Or if we think of them in terms of their pedagogical ancestry, the Aristotelian approach, the Augustinian approach, and the Platonic approach.

If the ACCS offers a Christian classicism and Paideia champions a democratic classicism, Hicks can be described as a spokesman for a moral classicism. Each approach to classicism described here rests on somewhat different philosophical foundations, though their intentions and methods are quite similar and compatible. Douglas Wilson is an Augustinian: his school teaches that which can be known with systematic rigor, but it does so with an awareness of human sin, the need for God’s grace and sovereignty over all of life, positions that characterize Wilson’s specifically Reformed, Calvinist theology. . . . Mortimer Adler is an Aristotelian, and the Paideia proposal reflects the scrutiny of purpose, making of distinctions, and commonsense rationalism that are Aristotle’s legacy to Western thought. Hicks finds his inspiration in Plato. He builds his educational theory around a search for the ideal and a conviction that education should be a path to virtue. His curriculum is akin to the classical humanism of the Renaissance, which studies the humanistic disciplines to cultivate man’s potential.3

The ACCS approach to education is specifically and distinctively Christian, and hence it is more dogmatic and settled than what either Adler or Hicks would propose. The purpose of an open mind, the Christian classicists would say, paraphrasing Chesterton, is the same as the purpose of an open mouth—it is meant to close on something. While ACCS schools vary among themselves in their doctrinal commitments—some are Reformed, some more Lutheran, and others are confessional evangelical—they all would glory in their doctrinal commitment, seeing that commitment as the only way to gain educational traction in a slippery world.

Hick’s and Adler’s approaches have in common a dedication to dialectic in education. “The first characteristic of a classical school, according to Hicks, is its reliance on dialectic.”4

For ACCS schools, dialectic is one part of the educational process but not a first principle. The goal in classical Christian schools is to move from grammar to dialectic, and then from dialectic on to rhetoric. To remain in the dialectic would be considered a failure.

The goals vary as well. Adler would want to train students to be able to participate in the great conversation with intelligence and grace. While not differing with this, Hicks would want more of an emphasis on moral improvement. “Hick’s goal is to restore to education norms—standards of morality and excellence—and to education, the elevation of young students to lives of virtue and achievement.”5

So, then, what is the definition of classical education? It is important to understand that I am giving a stipulated definition. In no way do I begrudge other legitimate uses of the phrase. In other words, classical education, as I am using the phrase, refers to a particular pedagogical approach together with an emphasis on passing on the heritage of the West. The pedagogy refers to our commitment to Dorothy Sayers’s basic insight—that children grow naturally through stages that correspond nicely with the three elements of the Trivium. We teach the grammar of all subjects to the younger children; we teach dialectic to the children of junior-high age; and we teach the rhetorical disciplines to the high school students.

At the same time, Western culture receives the emphasis it does because this is the culture in which the Christian faith has made the greatest advances. Western civilization is not synonymous with the kingdom of God, but the histories of the two entities are so intertwined that one cannot be understood apart from the other. Try to imagine a decent history of the West that made no reference to Christianity or a church history that made no mention of Charlemagne or Constantine. We do not teach Western culture in a jingoistic fashion; rather, we believe that students who are taught to love their own culture will understand why other people love theirs. A man who honors his mother understands another man honoring his. In contrast, our society’s multicultural experiment attempts to teach children to respect the cultures of others by instilling in them a practical contempt for their own. But global harmony will take far more than occasional food fairs with samples of international spicy foods.


Notes
Gene Edward Veith, Jr., and Andrew Kern, Classical Education: The Movement Sweeping America (Washington D.C.: Capital Research Center, 2001), p. 26.

“Thomas Jefferson School Curriculum Guide.” The school is located at 4100 South Lindbergh Boulevard, St. Louis, MO 63127.

Veith and Kern, Classical Education, p. 33-34.

Ibid., p. 36.

Ibid., p. 40.


Related reading:  Response to Sayers' Lost Tools of Learning

The Final Redemption of Cats

For Timothy, in the Coinherence
Dorothy Sayers

“Tutti tirati sono, e tutti tirano” –
(Paradiso xxviii, 129)

Consider, O Lord, Timothy, Thy servants’ servant.
(We give him this title, as to Thy servant the Pope,
Not knowing a better. Him too Thy ministers were
observant
To vest in white and adorn with a silk cope.)

Thy servant lived with Thy servants in the exchange
Of affection; he condescended to them from the
dignity
Of an innocent mind; they bent to him with benignity
From the rarefied Alps of their intellectual range.

Hierarchy flourished, with no resentment
For the unsheathed claw or the hand raised in
correction;
Small wild charities took root beneath the Protection,
Garden-escapes from the Eden of our contentment.

Daily we came short in the harder human relation,
Only in this easier obeying, Lord, Thy commands;
Meekly we washed his feet, meekly he licked our
hands -
Beseech Thee, overlook not this mutual grace of
salvation.

Canst Thou accept our pitiful good behaving,
Stooping to share at our hand that best we keep for
the beast?
Sir, receive the alms, though least, and bestowed on
the least,
Save us, and save somehow with us the means of our
saving.

Dante in the Eight Heaven beheld love's law
Run up and down on the infinite golden stairway;
Angels, men, brutes, plants, matter, up that fairway
All by love's cords are drawn, said he, and draw.

Thou that before the Fall didst make pre-emption
Of Adam, restore the privilege of the Garden,
Where he to the beasts was namer, tamer, and
warden;
Buy back his household and all in the world's
redemption.

When the Ark of the new life grounds upon Ararat
Grant us to carry into the rainbow's light,
In a basket of gratitude, the small, milk-white
Silken identity of Timothy, our cat.

Another Look at Sayers' "Lost Tools of Learning"

In the essay that follows, Hope E. Rapson, recounts her journey from student to teacher. In retrospect, she sees how she personally benefited from a Classical Education.


I read The Lost Tools of Learning by Dorothy Sayers first as a university student. It made me appreciate that my family had provided me with a classical education in spite of the fact that at twenty-two years of age, I had attended twenty-two different public schools. My grandmother, schooled through the Trivium by missionary parents in India in the late 1880’s, graduated with her Master’s Degree in English Literature and Christian Theology at the age of twenty. A contemporary and admirer of Dorothy Sayers, she strongly advocated and practiced its philosophy of education as a college literature professor, an ordained minister, parent, and grandparent. She truly embraced the goal of education---“to teach men how to learn for themselves.” In my “Poll-Parrot” or grammar years, I was primarily under the care and tutelage of this woman who read her Bible from the original Greek and Hebrew. She supplemented every subject I received in the local “progressive” California school with lessons on the weekends. She took me through the complete Bible relating its events in secular history. She had me instructed in the grammar of music, and delights of classical literature and poetry. She played geography games with me integrated with exposure to different periods of history and customs of language and culture.

In my “Pert” years or dialectic years, my father began to teach me dialectic reasoning, helping me discern, understand, and often refute much of the assumptions taught as truth in the increasing more liberal public schools that I attended. As a Doctor of Jurisprudence, he was fully equipped to argue the use and discount the misuse of evidence and logic. As a new Christian, he was able to analyze and practically apply Scripture to form a new style…Classically Christian…of approaching my education. Theology was a woven piece of every subject, including the explosion of scientific and mathematical study following Sputnik.

I entered my rhetoric years studying Latin, Western Civilization and advanced mathematics while living in the Philippines and traveling through Asia. The world opened up to me as a synthetic whole because grammar and dialect had prepared me to think through my observations, my questions, and how to research for answers. The geography, the events of history, the rules of logic, the ability to speak, write, and creatively communicate enabled me to study classical piano and cultural anthropology at the University of the Philippines while finishing my high school in three years.

My experience of the Quadrivium was then and has continued to be difficult because it has made me different. Training under professors, and with students and other teachers who are products of “modernized education” has placed me in the position of being “old fashioned, too difficult, abnormal, even un-Christian” in my profession of forty-two years. In our culture, where specialization, psychology, naturalism, secularism, and politically correct talk dominate, it has been a struggle to maintain Christian and classical life goals as a professional teacher. I am reminded of something that Saint Anthony the Great said: “A time is coming when men will go mad, and when they see someone who is not mad, they will attack him saying, ‘You are mad, you are not like us.’” (The Desert Christian: Sayings of the Desert Fathers, translated by B. Ward, Macmillan, 1975)

However, in retrospect I realize that my career reveals the synthesis that results from having a classical education and a classical approach. I have taught preschool through adults, every subject, grades in both public, private, Christian, secular, and home schools. What a challenge! What a proof! I was taught how to learn. I need not teach kindergarten or music for thirty years. I can create synthesize and create new curriculum, integrate Bible into every subject area, present grammar, dialectic, and rhetoric in many subjects, and on multiple levels. Why? I found the “lost tools of learning,” and I am committed to teaching students to take hold of these tools so that they can be life-long learners.


Related reading: More on Sayers and Classical Education; Response to Sayers' Lost Tools of Learning

Response to Sayers’ “Lost Tools of Learning”

Alice C. Linsley


I have been fond of Dorothy Sayers’ writing for over twenty years. It was while reading her Lord Peter Whimsey novels that I came to appreciate the power of literary fiction and I began to write fiction. I consider Sayers’ Nine Tailors and Gaudy Night to be the most finely crafted English mystery novels ever written. They reveal her exceptional eye for detail in story telling, her remarkable vocabulary and grasp of syntax, and her spiritual insights.

Sayers' facility with the English language rests on her exceptionally good classical training. In “The Lost Tools of Learning” Sayers begins by criticizing the modern tendency to regard specialized talking heads as “authorities” on everything from morals to DNA. She opines that the greatest authorities on the failure of modern education are those who learned nothing. We can imagine chuckles coming from some in her audience and frowns on the faces of self-important academics.

While Sayers is correct that we can’t “turn back the wheel” to the late Middle Ages when metaphysical exploration was still regarded as an objective of education, she nevertheless urges that we consider patterning education along those lines in order to restore the lost tools of learning. Sayers draws on her extensive knowledge of the medieval period to help us understand which tools are essential if students are to be life-long learners. She lays the groundwork by asking her audience to consider some “disquieting thoughts” about the direction of English society in the mid-twentieth century and identifies the following concerns:

Irresponsible prolongation of intellectual childhood to justify teaching less in more subjects

Confusion of fact and opinion, or the proven and the plausible, in the media.

Sophistry in public debate, rather than logical rhetoric.

Committees addressing mostly irrelevant matters expected to form public policy.

Failure to define terms and intentional abuse of language, making words mean whatever one wants them to mean.

A society of adults who don’t know how to discern legitimate expertise from popular pulp and who can’t use the library.

The tendency of some people to become so specialized that they can’t make connections between the disciplines.

Scientists who fail to adhere to the basic principles of Aristotelian logic, thus presenting speculation as facts.

Sayers’ critique of the society in which she lived is relevant today, as these problems have become more pronounced in our time. In 35 years of teaching I have seen the materialist worldview come to dominate public education and inch by inch erode the more balanced offering of private schools, parochial schools and even Christian schools. This is the disastrous outcome of Pragmatism's hold on American public education. Once metaphysics is excised from education, we are left with a mechanistic, materialistic, and blatantly false view of reality. And we wonder why our students are not learning? Why they seem unmotivated, and lack skills for intelligent living?

What does Dorothy Sayers recommend? She suggests restoration of the two part syllabus of the Trivium and the Quadrivium, which together provide “one coherent scheme of mental training.” Sayers illustrates how modern intellectuals misrepresent medieval metaphysical education by pointing to how one such intellectual confuses location and extension, something that a classically trained high school sophomore would hardly stumble over, having learned the principles of Aristotelian logic.

Sayers provides quotations from the Times Literary Supplement to demonstrate the widespread ignorance of good reasoning. I’d like to provide an illustration from contemporary life. I teach a college class on Philosophical Ethics. Students were asked to read Jonathan Rauch’s “Case for Gay Marriage” in the required text. They were to assess his argument using syllogistic reasoning. Out of 18 adult students, not one was able to identify Rauch’s premises or identify his conclusion. Finally, I had to do the assessment for them. Here is what I showed them:

J. Rauch’s Fallacious Argument

First Premise:
Marriage is necessary to providing reliable caregivers. (This assumption is not true. It is, in fact, verifiable false since we are able to observe that reliable caregivers exist who are not married to the people to whom they provide care. In fact, some paid caregivers are superior in their reliability than some spouses.)

Second Premise:
Marriage is necessary to tame men. (This assumption is hypothetical and unverifiable. Who says that men need “taming”? What does “taming” mean? Does it mean to make men more effeminate or to teach them to cook and clean? Are all unmarried men untamed? Are all married men tamed?)

Conclusion:
Therefore, marriage is equally necessary for heterosexual and homosexual couples. (His conclusion is not valid as it does not necessarily follow from the premises.)

Rauch’s premises are not verifiably true, so this is not a sound argument. Further, his conclusion does not logically follow from his premises, so this argument is not valid. Lacking true premises and a valid conclusion, Rauch’s argument is said to be “fallacious” or logically false.

It is indeed “disquieting” that an entire class of students, mostly already in the work force, was unable to logically assess Rauch’s argument. American students are unprepared to defend truth and are therefore prey to panderers and false authorities. Without the classical methodology, modern education is proving to be a futile enterprise. The “intellectual capital” of past ages is entirely spent.

Sayers is spot on in suggesting that the time to tackle such argumentation is when students are at their most argumentative, that is, during the first 3 years of high school. This is the perfect time to teach them to identify invalid inference and to debate the merits of an argument. As she reminds us, children are “born casuists” and can be taught to appreciate a “well-turned argument.”

When students begin to recognize the limitations of logic and human reason, it is time to turn to Rhetoric, which “will tend to show them that all knowledge is one.” Here we find ourselves on solid metaphysical ground where we quickly discover that there is absolute truth or there is nothing, and it is impossible to be a nihilist and be well-educated.


Related reading:  Pragmatism and American Education; The Lost Tools of Learning; Dorothy Sayers: A Mind of Her Own; The Wisdom of Dorothy Sayers; D. Sayers' Last Morning in Oxford