Ep 05 | Plato, St. John Chrysostom, and Charlotte Mason: The Soul as a City
Mothers at the ready! Guard the city gates!
Actually, I’m not kidding. Your child’s soul is a bit like a city, and, in the pursuit of virtue, Plato, Mason, and St. John Chrysostom have quite a bit to say about guarding the City of Mansoul and the imitation of goodness.
Swords at the ready?
Footnotes for this episode
“An Address on Vainglory and the Right Way for Parents to Bring Up Their Children,” St. John Chrysostom
Apology, Plato
The Republic, Plato
Ourselves, Charlotte Mason
A Philosophy of Education, Charlotte Mason
Plutarch’s Lives, Plutarch
Breaking Bread with the Dead, Alan Jacobs
“On Man: Heir of All Ages,” G. K. Chesterton
The Great Tradition, Ed. Richard Gamble
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READ THE TRANSCRIPT
A few weeks past, I came across an old Girl Scout handbook in an antique store. I have a six-year-old daughter, you know, and this was right up her alley. It’s full of all sorts of things every respectable young lady should know like keeping chickens, good citizenship, tying knots, properly ordering one’s wardrobe, and basic first aid. It also includes, as my daughter read to me, the proper way of making introductions.
Allow me to steal a page from the 1947 Girl Scout handbook to begin our exploration of virtue.
Dear listener, may I present Mr. Plato, St. John Chrysostom, and Ms. Charlotte Mason?
Now you say, “How do you do?”
______
If this podcast had a patron saint who-is-not-a-saint, it would be C.S. Lewis. The man finds a way to make it into almost every episode. It was ol’ Jack who gave me my first intentional boundary in my literary life: read more old books than new books. Being naturally bookish and studying history for undergrad, I read books about old things; but that’s not quite the same thing as reading old books, is it?
Lewis also gives another piece of literary advice in his introduction to St. Athanasius’ On the Incarnation when he says that while it shows a bit of humility to be wary of meeting the great old writers face-to-face, it is actually us to whom they wish to speak. And—luckily for us—it’s typically easier to read them than to read about them. I believe his exact example is one of our philosophers today: Plato. Reading Plato, he said, is far easier than reading modern philosophers who’ve written hundreds of pages about Platonism.
I can confirm this is true.
But there’s another angle here I think important. The works of those like Plato, St. John Chrysostom, and Charlotte Mason should be considered our rightful inheritance. We shouldn’t be wary of reading them, we should see them as a gift intended for us. G.K. Chesterton—who we will see later in this mini-series—actually talks about this in an essay called, “On Man: Heir of All the Ages”. Did you catch that? Heir of all the ages.
While the wisdom and folly of the past are our birthright, it’s easy to forget about the past in the rushing waters of information in the modern age or, at our worst, despise the past. If we are heirs, we’re the kind who crinkle our noses at the family heirlooms and leave them in the back corner of the attic. We lose whole bodies of thought and the practical pursuit of “the good life”, leaving ourselves unjustly disinherited.
This will not do in these common places.
So, following Lewis’ advice, I stopped buying new books—even about old things—and started hunting for old books, trying to meet the greats face-to-face. It’s been one of the nicest things I’ve ever done for myself. Spending time in the company of the old is much like having a mirror before you that reflects you in a slightly different light. When you read new books, they too can be a mirror but one that reflects you as you are; it is your time and place and, after all, you are formed in the image of your time and place. But to meet with the old is to be measured by their time and place, by their wisdom or folly. And when you’re faced with great wisdom, the image reflected back demands you arrange your life, your thoughts, your loves according to this realm in which you find fellow souls sojourning towards truth, goodness, and beauty.
And that realm is the good life. And the good life is the pursuit of virtue.
And so now, we begin.
We’ve journeyed with Mason for the better part of a year and a half and we’ve spent a jolly holiday with Plato over the first part of this season, and as such, I’m going to continue under the assumption that you’ve listened and mulled over those many episodes before today so our newest philosopher can be our guide and anchor through the idea of a soul as a city.
St. John Chrysostom, henceforth referred to as St. John, was a fourth-century archbishop of Constantinople known for his eloquence, which earned him the name Golden Mouth, and for his work on the Divine Liturgy which is still practiced almost every Sunday in Eastern Orthodox churches around the world.
I came across one of his treatises on childrearing and it struck me—as many old things do—with its practical nature. While there are some oddball instructions like giving your sons neither too soft of couches nor sweet-smelling perfumes, there are practical instructions that touch every part of a child. There are boundary lines that we might find fall in very pleasant places.
I think there’s a wariness in the broad church today to say definitively what a parent ought to do; even we Christians are too deep in the waters of you do you. But giving explicit instructions, as it pertains to cultivating virtue, was not a problem for St. John, Plato, or Mason. I think they thought it their duty to pass on the keys of wisdom through a very similar idea: the soul as a city.
As any mother knows, the soul of a child is a precious thing to be guarded and labored over. Most Christian mothers prioritize the care of the soul, or the spiritual life, above all else, believing the molding, forming, and training of the soul is eternal. And being mindful that your mind and body are required in the keeping of a soul, I think this is right.
And so did our other philosophers today. All believed in the power of and need for habit for guiding the soul to maturity. Mason includes discipline as one of her three instruments. Plato believed habits were trained through imitation but only if practiced from childhood on. And St. John believed that children needed to be given a pattern of good in order to imitate it as habit. These habits, along with self-restraint and deepening wisdom, would create, in St. John’s work, a soul city for God.
I think what always gets me when I’m reading old books is how it can almost sound like I’m reading a new book. Mason was worried about the schools at the turn of the 20th century, writing about the spiritually and intellectually wounded youth graduating with disordered loves and empty leisure. Her critiques of the literature, practices, and outcomes of the Victorian schools sound almost like a homeschool mom on Instagram. There’s nothing new under the sun and all that.
Which is why we can go farther back to St. John in the 4th century and see his growing concern that people were replacing the true goal of education—virtue—with lesser things. I know I’ve said it quite a bit this season, but the understood point of education has primarily been moral formation, or virtue, throughout history. But, of course, there have always been distractions and pulls away from this goal. Where we find our footing again is back in the conversation of virtue. That is the thread that weaves through the centuries, places, people or the past; who are the ones calling people back to education as the cultivation of virtue? Follow them. Stick to the narrow path. Aim for the celestial city.
This was St. John’s charge for parents. He believed the work of parents was difficult and holy. The slow shaping of a soul required the utmost care, intention, and, in his words, guarding.
When it came to the raising of children, St. John’s caution is against encouraging wrong longings and desires, or, what we might call, wrong loves. He believed that good precepts are impressed on the soul when children are young. If you can imagine wax drying into a hard seal, then you’ve got the right idea. Help them imitate goodness in their habits on the front end and they will harden into character in the future.
Which means the things happening in the early life of the child are incredibly important. Every child comes, as Mason says, with the possibilities of good or evil and it is our job to find the good qualities God has supplied so we can cultivate them and to note the faults so we can help battle them. This right here is echoed in Plato, Mason, and, of course, St. John.
Now I know that we common moms are not all in the early years of formal education, but, even if you are mid-re-directing your educational philosophy in the home, his instruction on the five senses is still applicable and helpful. If you do, however, have little ones around you, stand at the ready.
A soul city must be guarded if the city is to, one day, be ruled well.
So, what is a city and why are these three using it for the soul?
Well, just as a city is good and bad, the thoughts and reasonings of a soul are good and bad. In a city, some are thieves, some are honest men. Some make war, some work steadily. Some receive orders, some are free. In all cities, there must be laws to encourage the good and prevent evil; there’s always a quiet watch for uprisings and a hope to move closer towards that which is true, good, and beautiful.
The soul of a child is a new city with citizen strangers who have no experience yet and so while they are, as Mason says, immature, they’re also more easily directed and more readily accept the laws given to them. We all know it’s easier to shape the inclinations of a boy than to change the character of a man, and St. John wanted parents to understand our role as a king ruling over our child’s soul in these early, formative years. When we ask to what end ought we aim, all three philosophers give us the same answer: for the heavens.
Yes, even Plato, a pagan, believed that man ought to look to the heaves to found a city within himself, but, of course, St. John and Charlotte Mason had the fullness of this answer in mind when thinking of guarding a soul for a life built for service to Christ, the King.
So, in the city of Mansoul—to steal Mason’s steal of John Bunyan—there are citizens that travel in and out of the city who are either rightly guided or corrupted. They come in or out through the tongue, the ear, the nose, the eyes, and the skin. It’s the five senses and these are the gates of St. John’s soul city and the areas at which mother-teachers stand at the ready to bring truth, goodness, and beauty in the atmosphere, discipline, and life of their homes and home educations.
The busiest gate is the tongue, which any mom knows when in the company of young children who have many questions, ideas, thoughts, and feelings to share with you. I love St. John’s image of the child’s speech; it should be of pure gold, not just gold leaf, filled with the noblest, most beautiful ideas, because our city is not being crafted for any mere mortal but for the King. It reminds me of that C.S. Lewis bit wherein he says to think of yourself as a house and that God is coming to rebuild you. You thought you were being made into a decent cottage but it turns out, God is making you into a palace. A palace in which he intends to live.
When you believe that your child’s soul is meant for the presence of God, the bar is raised much higher than having nice or sweet kids. We start to think about fashioning citizens worthy of the city. We start thinking about excellence. We start thinking about virtue.
And while it’s difficult work to train a tongue, St. John lays it out for us like this:
First, you must train a child in right speech. Fill their mouths with the words of scripture. Give them lovely speech, equip them with the words they should be saying. This is when one of my favorite Mason quotes comes to mind as an addition: Man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that proceedeth out of the mouth of God shall man live,––whether it be spoken in the way of some truth of religion, poem, picture, scientific discovery, or literary expression; by these things men live and in all such is the life of the spirit. This is why we avoid twaddle in literature, music, and film. Do we want to form the habit of harmful speech—for the hearer or speaker?
Second, drive strangers away so no corruption mingles with citizens. When reading this, I felt convicted as a mother-teacher. With many little ones trying on various virtues and vices in their speech, it can feel impossible to whack-a-mole every stranger that appears in the midst of the good citizens at the gate of the tongue. I mean, so much comes out of the mouth of any one of my kids on a given day. I’m raising three children with a great love of speaking. I can’t figure out from whence it came.
But anyway, I was reminded of a helpful counsel from Mason. We can’t despise our children—by which she means leaving undone what we ought to have done for them—but we also can’t give them a contrived environment. To the first part, it is our duty to train our children in right speech, to steer them away from wrong speech. We’re under authority just as our children are and we can’t neglect this duty. But within that duty, we’re not going to create an environment or a family rule or a discipline strategy that removes the need for a child to learn to be actually be good, not just look good. They will try on catchphrases and stinker name-calling and things they call jokes. But this commonplace childhood life is also the ordained stage in which they can learn right from wrong, in which they will heed your counsel, even if it takes time, and in which they grow their wills to the point of accepting or rejecting the good citizens that strengthen Mansoul. As we help their citizens towards virtue, we also can’t manipulate them through fear, love, suggestion, or bribes. It’s one thing to scare or bribe a child into not saying something, it’s another thing to lay a long track of beautiful ideas, faithful habits, and models worth imitating in the home.
So, in case you feel like you’ve already scored 0/2 on St. John’s list…keep that context in mind.
Third, be zealous on a few things: speak ill of no man, do not be contentious, and do not swear. Teach the child to be fair and courteous. And, as best you can, enlist the adults who regularly interact with your child to hold him to this standard. And since we’re pulling from such old philosophers today, that includes the tutors, servants, nurses, cooks, governesses, maids, housekeepers, and the like. You know, for all of those you have around your house too.
Ah, reading the old guys.
In our Habits 101 Course in Common House, we’ve been slowly working through Mason’s many categories of habits and I’ve been explaining which sets are intentionally trained and which are sort of “caught” in the atmosphere of the home. Mason was also adamant that parents must teach their children to be courteous in speech, to only speak well of others, and to treat them as fellow image bearers, always searching for the bit of good that is in everyone. This is one of those that may require some verbal instruction but is primarily modeled for the child in how the mother speaks of others, treats others, and even shares in conversations about culture, concerns, and, yes, education.
In the classical world, there’s this phrase that the teacher is the curriculum, and I see it echoed throughout home education when it comes to the responsibility of the mother to be one who is cultivating virtue in herself. Imitation, a chief practice in classical education, requires the imitation of the actions of another or, as Plato wrote, the Ideal. While we give our children a feast of ideas, characters, heroes, and tales to imitate, we—as mothers—are the central figures in their imitation. It wouldn’t be a bad thing to hold ourselves to these standards laid out in St. John’s city.
So, before we move on to hearing, or the ears, I have to tell you something encouraging. St. John says it only takes two months to form this habit of speech. Before you think that seems too short because surely you’ve been working far longer than that in your home, please note that Mason had also mentioned the ridiculously short time of one month in training more pleasant habits. I doubt either would have written it in ink if they did not have convincing evidence of the timeframe. Just some food for thought.
Onto hearing. This is the only gate that requires protection from the outside which means you stand against the world. St. John’s counsel is obvious: nothing corrupt may tread upon the threshold. But he gives a few more clarifying parameters:
First, children shouldn’t hear frivolous things from those in authority. He actually says a child can hear these things from servants but never from his parents, tutors, or those in positions over him. I think this means we need not panic when our children hear a dumb joke from a friend as long as the norm in their life is to hear our really excellent jokes.
Second, a child shouldn’t hear anything harmful from anyone. Think of them like tender shoots in need of tender care. Something harmful is different than something juvenile.
Third, it’s not only that you guard against lesser things, you also have to give them better things. From Plato to Mason, the encouragement has been to give them the very best stories, language, histories, and such. And one reason why, as St. John notes, is that it teaches the child to marvel at what is good. To put that in Mason speak: the child wonders or is in awe. The soul will be aware of the benefit of good stories; it will long for more. Start with the stories of scripture but tell them in your own words and show your true enjoyment and love for them. The child will recognize them when we hear them at church and be delighted to hear “his stories”, as Mason would say. Ask them to tell you the stories after a while so you grow, in the soul, a wealth of true riches, a sense of wonder which shapes how they move in the world, and a longing that can only be satisfied in right living through a life of virtue.
When we get to smell, St. John doesn’t have much to say and, honestly, I found myself laughing at most of it. He states plainly that the nose is for breathing air, not sweet odours. None of those essential oils, guys. Why does he say this? Well, his thinking is as follows: sweet odours relax the mind and body which allows pleasures to be fanned into flame.
Remember what we learned from Mason about reason? It’s a yes man. Once you’ve accepted an idea, reason will find a way to tell you you’re right. I’m going to chalk this one up to that process of reasoning.
Onward to the eyes! These are exceptionally difficult gates to guard as they’re high up and wide open, but he gives a few tips:
First, avoid the theatres so the child won’t suffer corruption through lewd actions performed by inappropriate persons with improper speech. While you can certainly find that in our theatres in the United States, I think the principle here can be applied to the many forms of media, entertainment, and content we have aplenty today. This could be books, shows, social media, parades, podcasts, YouTube, or, if you’re like me living in a city, a casual walk down the block to the market. And St. John adds a bonus on this one that I took to heart: have your servants run ahead to warn the children in case something or someone unsavoury waits down the street.
I haven’t figured out which kid I’m going to make the run-ahead servant…I’m kidding. I have to guard their eyes!
But I think this must be harder than it may have been in the 4th century. St. John says to keep your young boys out of crowds of women and so I have to assume it was possible to avoid the mass public in a way that is not possible for most of us. But I think the spirit of the counsel is one we can all pursue: be mindful of the places you go, the sites you see, the content you hand your children.
Just as we don’t guard only against the bad at each gate, we must also put in the good. St. John says to give harmless pleasure to the eyes by giving them much time in nature. We know how Mason felt about the need for time out-of-doors but even Plato believed that the natural order of the natural world was worth studying and, wouldn’t you know it, the soul had to be ordered likewise.
St. John ends with touch or the skin and it’s as funny to me as the nose. He is insistent that we’re raising athletes and, therefore, are not allowed to give our sons soft couches. No, really, that’s one of his main points. No soft couches. I do wonder what he’d think about the Mason mom world linking to all of their favorite products for comfort…
But I digress.
Clearly, the work of guarding the gates is that of the mother-teacher in the early years. An immature person with immature tastes cannot be trusted to guard himself; no, that takes years of training, imitating, marveling, and loving. Eventually, though, the gatekeeper will become the child as their will is strengthened to say yes to that which is good for Mansoul and to reject that which harms it.
Which is, after all, the point of education. To offer the knowledge, practices, and life of the world as God made and governs it through the pursuit of truth, goodness, and beauty. This is the only soil in which virtue can grow, and the boundary line for the life of the Soul City.
While we followed St. John Chrysostom for most of the episode, I can’t help but close out with the favoured lady of the podcast, because, as usual, she said it best:
Of all the fair lands, there is none more fair than the country of the Kingdom of Man’s Soul.
Guard faithfully.
I’ll see you guys in four weeks.
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