The Western Tradition & Our Intellectual Inheritance | Anthony Esolen | Conference of Miletus 2024

Wikipedia: 

Anthony M. Esolen is a writer, social commentator, translator of classical poetry, and Distinguished Professor of Humanities at Thales College, having been invited to join the faculty in 2023. He previously taught at Furman University, Providence College, Thomas More College of Liberal Arts and Magdalen College of the Liberal Arts.

Esolen has translated into English Dante’s Divine Comedy, Lucretius’ On the Nature of Things, and Torquato Tasso’s Jerusalem Delivered. He is the author of over 30 books and over 1,000 articles in such publications as The Modern Age, The Catholic World Report, Chronicles, for which he serves as a contributing editor, The Claremont Review of Books, The Public Discourse, First Things, Crisis Magazine, The Catholic Thing, and Touchstone, for which he serves as a senior editor. He is a regular contributor to Magnificat, and has written frequently for a host of other online journals. He is a poet in his own right, and his book-length sacred poem, The Hundredfold, has been called a Christian poetic masterpiece.

Esolen, a Catholic, writes on a broad field of topics—literature, the arts, and social commentary—and is known as a conservative and a traditionalist scholar. Professor Esolen, who had taught in the Development of Western Civilization program at Providence College for twenty-seven years, Professor Esolen criticized the concept of “diversity” as the term is commonly used in the modern academy and became the target of a campus protest. The administration’s actions in response to this protest influenced his decision to leave Providence College.

An excerpt from, “A Flight into Reality” By Anthony Esolen, Crisis Magazine, August 13, 2024:

Francis appears to believe that people who often appeal to what we can know, cognitively, about God and man, good and evil, and the Christian faith, people whose clear moral categories instruct them to say that this kind of action is right and that kind is wrong, will be the less likely students of literature. What I observe in the United States is the reverse. The great educational movement in our midst involves a return to what is called “classical” but what really is simply a traditional education in arts and letters that even such a utilitarian as John Stuart Mill assumed that young people should have.  

You are therefore likelier to read Homer in a conservative Christian school than at Princeton; you are likelier to read Dante at the Bible Institute of Los Angeles than at a Catholic college whose faith has become frail and thin, as it has at the great majority of such in the United States. I recall a spirited conversation I had long ago with two students from that same Biola University as they drove me to the airport in Los Angeles; it was on Palestrina and polyphony. They were the experts, and I was the neophyte. Such things no longer surprise me.

My friend Ralph Wood, honored professor of English at Baylor, is a Baptist who loves the Catholic Church and who has spent many years teaching the works of Flannery O’Connor, that author of “the Christ-haunted South.” He is by no means alone at that Baptist college, which is far more welcoming of traditional Catholic scholars than most Catholic colleges are. If you asked me where to send a bright young Catholic so that he or she can get a strong education in literature among Christian believers, rather than risk his faith among people who know neither literature nor theology, I would recommend Baylor in a heartbeat.

But we have not yet mentioned one most powerful reason for studying literature. It is to get yourself free of the solipsism of the present, to see more clearly what Russell Kirk called “the permanent things.” Once you leave the current welter of political passion, and the sexual fads that have careered into madness, and you open a book written in another time from ours, you stand a chance of encountering truths we have forgotten, or truths we are not permitted to notice, to affirm, to describe, to investigate, and to allow to change us from within. I take no advice about money from a profligate, and I take no advice about men and women from people of our time, who cannot find in themselves sufficient love, one sex for the other, to replace themselves with children, and whose art and literature cannot boast a single mirthful and innocent song of love in forty years.

By all means, let us read literature. May I recommend, dear readers, that you begin with the man I consider the greatest virtuoso of religious poetry in English, George Herbert? A single one of his poems will repay you a hundredfold, and you will not have to wrangle about religious or political factions to do it. Take that flight into reality.

Video Title: The Western Tradition & Our Intellectual Inheritance | Anthony Esolen | Conference of Miletus 2024. Source: Thales Press. Date Published: July 17, 2024. Description:

Today, many educators downplay the value of the Western canon. They discount any wisdom or insights one may glean from being steeped in the tradition we have inherited. 

In this lecture from the Conference of Miletus, Anthony Esolen presents five reasons why teachers ought to teach the great works of the Western tradition and the impact it can have on students at a classical school.