Building the Microcosmos, Part 3: Ethos
The assumption of Paideia
Part 1: Logos here.
Part 2: Mythos here.
“The mythos is the very skeleton of civilization. Remove it and watch all the flesh of political stability, scientific invention, and social sophistication collapse. Myths, like the panegyrics at a Roman funeral, remind man to think and to act out of a sense of responsibility toward the past. Those who forget the past are bound to be condemned to repeat its mistakes ad infinitum. Myths inspire men to perform great and selfless deeds by assuring and warning them that their actions are not individual, but symbolic. [Myth’s] actions and ideas have never-ending consequences.”
That’s from the book Norms and Nobility by David V. Hicks, a work that has forced me to devote serious energy to suppressing a hitherto unknown temptation to plagiarism. If you read anything about Classical Education, it should be that book. I’ve read it three times now, and I think it will only be another three reads or so before I find a second quote I feel confident in accurately sharing.
”Adam, why would you be tempted to plagiarize a book if you claim to understand only one quote from it?” Just trust me, when you read it, you’ll find that it’s the kind of book that’s so dense with truth you will feel compelled to share it with everyone you know, and your brain will start to collapse from the gravity of attempting to express its ideas in their fulness in your own words. Occasionally, its wisdom escapes the orbit of my ignorance.
Joking aside, Hicks affirms our lesson from last week that “myth is the tree,” and he goes on to assert that its influence extends to everything. The connections made at the earliest levels of our development have a knock-on effect that reverberates throughout history. The interactions of our microcosms constitute and shape our lives, producing what we call ethos, the embodied spirit of our culture. But before we get to that, we have to dig a little bit deeper into how we engage with mythos, and what takes it from the gentle interface of the playground to the realm of civilizational stewardship.
Mythos is “the skeleton of civilization,” as Hicks puts it, because mythos provokes us to compare ourselves and our experiences with the symbols, the logoi, we encounter in myth. Those provocations and comparisons influence our decision making, but where does that process start?
Foundationally, myth, and I will expand this to include art as well, is essential, because it enriches the body of knowledge for all symbols. A myth- “a text” -or a piece of art- “an artifact of creative expression” -is something we create in an attempt to capture the logos of existence. You might read that and ask, “Well, what if I’m not creative? I’m still here, how is it essential?” Not everyone has to be creative, necessarily, but it is true that everyone never stops expanding their reservoir of symbolic knowledge, their microcosmos. That reservoir is constantly being refilled and expanded through the creation of new artifacts.
Understanding this process requires us to know how to engage myths analogically, as opposed to analytically. Modern education is almost exclusively focused on analytical understanding. It teaches us to “analyze,” that is, to take things apart and claim understanding of them because we know what they’re made of and accept a particular prescriptive meaning of their symbols. So, a story can be broken down into its component parts- opening, rising action, denouement, etc. -and then understood by identifying the correct meaning of its symbols, e.g. “the color yellow in The Great Gatsby represents death.” At least, that’s what I was taught about The Great Gatsby, anyway.
The problem with analysis of mythos is that its promise of understanding is false. It attempts to apply scientific rationalism to mythos, and this does not produce true understanding. It doesn’t produce true understanding because it doesn’t create new branches in the microcosmos, because it assigns meaning to symbols instead of discovering it. What on earth does the color yellow have to do with the fact that Gatsby can’t respect Daisy’s marriage? Why would that be the question I ask?
Because looking at stories analogically means grappling with the same questions that their characters grapple with, even if those questions aren’t explicitly stated in the text. Should Achilles defy Agamemnon? Should Sydney Carton return to France? Should Hamlet look for the ghost? This carries over to dwelling on how characters would behave in the situations we find ourselves in. “What would Gimli do?” as nerdy as it sounds, was a question I used to ask myself often. Frankly, I don’t ask it enough anymore.
As Classical teachers, part of our task is to help our students start asking these questions for themselves. Our answers to these questions, and our reflections on the consequences of those answers, shape our lives. Thus, logos, symbolic knowledge spread through mythos, becomes real life. Which brings us to ethos.
Ethos is the precipitate, the telos, of a fully armed and operational microcosmos (which, just to bring the reference full circle here, I like to imagine resembling the second Death Star rather than the first). It marks the point at which symbolic knowledge becomes real life because it’s when the logoi we encounter start to serve our soul by calcifying into Paideia. It is the assumption of our culture.
This happens when symbolic knowledge becomes real life by influencing our ethical consistency. Ethos resides in the moment when we start to make judgments about the microcosms we share our school with. Students interrogate their fellow microcosms in ethical terms. “Do I want to play with this other kid? Does he follow the rules I want to follow? Does he break the rules I want to break? Is she a fox or a lion? Is he Agamemnon or Achilles? Am I Agamemnon or Achilles?” Or, more commonly at my school, “Is he Mario or Sonic the Hedgehog?” The logoi change, but the calculus of ethical consistency is constantly engaged and informed by the symbolic knowledge received from mythos.
Of course, we live in a world now that doesn’t acknowledge these truths and has lost its understanding of how to impart them to our children. My head mentor at Circe once said that Classical Education is triage. Our work is called a renewal rather than a revolution because we’re trying to reanimate the traditions that helped Plato’s academy survive for nearly a thousand years and then influenced the post-Incarnation educational tradition, carried forward by figures like Quintilian, St. Augustine, and St. Thomas Aquinas. That means submitting ourselves to the Logos, filling our students’ days from an early age with mythos, and asking the questions that create ethos.
It is slow going work. Raw images and power fantasies dominate our mythos these days. Demagoguery and attention-seeking dominate our ethos. Kids want to be Sonic because he’s blue and has spikes and is supernaturally fast, not because he faces the same decisions and challenges that they do. Teens want to be influencers because their chests have been taught that attention is the same thing as honor. And neither young group is compelled to contemplate these things fully because they are imparted to them through images instead of logoi.
Forgive me. You don’t need to read another lamentation on these things. Complaining about this will do no good. Instead, attending to our students each day, embodying the tradition, trusting in the power of the Holy Spirit and the presence of the Logos- building the microcosmos -is how we pass on the Paideia of a life that is True, Good, and Beautiful.
May our Lord illuminate the righteous path He has laid before each of us and compel us to walk it dutifully and with joy.