ed3: Wisdom, Virtue, & The Great Recognition with Angela Weiss
Angela Weiss, experienced Charlotte Mason homeschooling mom, pastor's wife, life long learner, and burgeoning scholar, joins us on this episode of our special series on education to talk about how wisdom, virtue, and knowledge intersect and work upon us. She and Katie specifically discuss Charlotte Mason's essay on The Great Recognition, as depicted by the 14th century fresco titled The Triumph of Saint Thomas Aquinas and the Allegory of Christian Learning. It covers the left wall of the Spanish Chapel connected to the Santa Maria Novella in Florence, Italy and was referred to as the Vaulted Book by John Ruskin. Angela and Katie discuss at great length the immense comfort that comes from remembering that the Lord is the source of all wisdom, so that our children's education depends not upon how much we ourselves know, but on the Holy Spirit guiding and working upon our children as they touch great minds through living books. We hope you'll join us for a fun and wonderfully comforting conversation about the source and nature of true education!
Show Notes -
Commonplace Quotes:
It is probably worth saying a word here about how this kind of synthetic thinking works harmoniously toward the pursuit of virtue as the end of education. When we break things down analytically and lose connections, one of the connections that is lost is the connection between ourselves and the things we are learning. Our education does not spur us to right action, which is virtue, if we feel no personal attachment to our knowledge. - Karen Glass, Consider This
22 The Lord possessed me at the beginning of his work, the first of his acts of old.
23 Ages ago I was set up, at the first, before the beginning of the earth.
24 When there were no depths I was brought forth, when there were no springs abounding with water.
25 Before the mountains had been shaped, before the hills, I was brought forth,
26 before he had made the earth with its fields, or the first of the dust of the world.
27 When he established the heavens, I was there; when he drew a circle on the face of the deep,
28 when he made firm the skies above, when he established[c] the fountains of the deep,
29 when he assigned to the sea its limit, so that the waters might not transgress his command, when he marked out the foundations of the earth,
30 then I was beside him, like a master workman, and I was daily his[d] delight, rejoicing before him always,
31 rejoicing in his inhabited world and delighting in the children of man.
- Proverbs 8:22-31
“...but the Great Recognition, that God the Holy Spirit is himself, personally, the Imparter of knowledge, the Instructor of youth, the Inspirer of genius, is a conception so far lost to us that we should think it distinctly irreverent to conceive of the divine teaching as co-operating with ours in a child's arithmetic lesson, for example. But the Florentine mind of the middle ages went further than this: it believed not only that the seven Liberal Arts were fully under the direct out-pouring of the Holy Ghost, but that every fruitful idea, every original conception, whether in Euclid, or grammar, or music, was a direct inspiration from the Holy Spirit, without any thought at all as to whether the person so inspired named himself by the name of God, or recognised whence his inspiration came. All of these seven figures are those of persons whom we should roughly class as Pagans, and whom we might be lightly inclined to consider outside the pale of the divine inspiration. It is truly difficult to grasp the amazing boldness of this scheme of the education of the world, which Florence accepted in simple faith.” Ch. 25, Parents and Children by Charlotte Mason