There’s a very important word we’ve been dancing around since I started this venture in January: propriety.
Propriety is one of those things that was commonly understood in the pre-Dewey era of learning. It didn’t need to be taught explicitly because it was one of the precipitates of a properly ordered, rigorous education, conferred through mythos and shaped, refined, and directed by ethos. These days, however, it’s a remnant of that time, one of the many virtues and principles adrift at sea that we are endeavoring to fish back into the boat. And we need it back in the boat, because it’s kind of the whole show.
We’ve talked about the soul at length, and how properly ordering it and directing our emotions through it results in right action. That action is propriety. Propriety is the embodiment of an ordered soul. It is the knowledge and understanding of how to treat every thing, that is, every logos, as it should be treated. Therefore, propriety is uniquely important, because it is both done, and it is possessed. One’s propriety is both what they do, and how they ought to be dealt with. It is external and internal. The influence of the mind on the world.
Propriety shrinks and expands in proportion to one’s age and responsibilities. Age bestows responsibilities and responsibilities bestow rights and rights justify behavior. In the school, we begin the process of teaching this to the students with the book of Genesis. God is eternal, without age, and so His responsibilities and rights are self-conferred. He speaks creation into itself, and from that the whole natural order of things is laid out, as an example for us to follow in our work. This is why we use a liturgy for our classroom, because liturgy is the tool that habitualizes propriety.
Scripture is of course the lodestar of our understanding of propriety, but let’s say you’d like a more… mundane example. Consider baseball. Baseball is, to my mind, the preeminent example of propriety. It oozes propriety from every crack and crease, both in its formal rules, and the myriad of unwritten pieties that are governed and enforced in and across the strata of players, managers, and umpires.
Baseball is Propriety, the Game. The defense has claim to the ball, and together, they form a closed, statistical ecosystem of sorts. Pitch ball, strike batter out. Pitch ball, batter hits, field ball, throw runner out. Pitch, hit, fly out. And so on. The defense’s job is to treat the ball as its property and return it to the hands of the pitcher as seamlessly as they can. They are responsible for keeping the ball in the field and putting it where it needs to be in order to preserve the ecosystem, inflating their preferred statistics and suppressing the offense’s.
The offense’s job is to break this ecosystem. They use their bats and their legs to find gaps and upset the timing and structure of the defense. Their job is to demonstrate that the opponent’s ecosystem is weak and unsustainable. They are the anti-propriety to the defense’s propriety, and part of the beauty of the sport is that both teams trade these roles over the course of play. They embody both sides of the internal and external dynamic to determine the victor.
But that’s just the game on paper. In conduct, no sport is more obsessed with its own unwritten rules, its hidden, poetically understood propriety than baseball. It’s a game created by humans, for humans, each with their own micro-cosmos telling them how things ought to be and fighting for that with the other players, the managers, and the umpires. Don’t admire your hit too much, don’t swing on 3-0 with a multi-run lead, don’t bunt when the pitcher’s brewing a no-hitter. Players argue, fight, and are thrown out of baseball games over their own sense of propriety with such regularity that people have built entire media empires to cover it.
Like anything else, the condition of players’ souls influences their sense of propriety whether they realize it or not, and baseball players are a historically passionate bunch, few moreso than St. Louis Cardinals’ pitcher Bob Gibson. Gibson’s propriety was wrong, but I can’t deny that it had an admirable simplicity and consistency: he hated the opponent. According to his autobiography, Pitch By Pitch, his locker was adorned with the words, “I don’t discriminate. I hate everybody.”
Gibson was a plunker, and the bar for receiving a plunk from him was well within the boundaries of the offense’s stated goals. He was infamous for plunking anyone who hit a homer off of him, and his ability to hold a grudge received legendary status after his MLB retirement, when he hit Pete LaCock in his first at-bat during an MLB Old Timers exhibition game. LaCock’s offense? Hitting a grand slam off Gibson in his final game ten years prior to that.
Gibson’s propriety is, of course, not something I’m eager to pass on to my charges, but only because the form it took was vengeful. Vengeance is no virtue, at least in our hands, but what Gibson can teach us, and by extension, our students, is that being consistent in our propriety counts for a whole heck of a lot. It’s not more important than cultivating right, properly ordered and directed propriety, but it’s still precious. Whether or not Gibson’s responsibility to protect the ball gave him the right to plunk batters who bested him is an open question, but this is offset by the fact that he was consistent in his ethic. He retired a player who was deeply respected by his peers, beloved by fans, and soon enshrined in the MLB Hall of Fame.
Christ calls us to higher things than that, but all around us are people like Gibson, and characters like Aeneas, and Menelaus, and Eowyn. We may question them at points, and that’s because deep down we ourselves ought to be questioned, but they know and demonstrate what it is to lead with your chest, to face the world with propriety, and it is at our peril that we neglect to fish that into our boat as we continue on this voyage. We study the ancients, the pagans, and our fellow sinners to carry their good with us and leave the bad behind. It is what we do, so that our descendants may do the same to us.
May our Lord illuminate the righteous path He has laid before each of us and compel us to walk it dutifully and with joy.