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Can you really define what beauty is? Are there pitfalls to believing beauty is relative?

Join contributing author and editor for the Omnibus curriculum, Gene Veith for a stimulating discussion on truth, goodness, and beauty - and how defining what those are will shape the way we look at everything from art to theology and even mathematics!

Episode Transcription

Note: This transcription may vary from the words used in the original episode for better readability.

Marlin Detweiler:

Hello again. This is Marlin Detweiler with Veritas Vox, the voice of classical Christian education. Today we have with us someone who has become a dear friend of mine through our involvement in classical education Gene Edward Veith. Gene, welcome.

Gene Veith:

Good to be with you, Marlin.

Marlin Detweiler:

Gene, we have known each other for goodness for more than 20 years. But tell us, for the sake of our audience, a little bit of your background and what you did as a career. I know that you're retired now, but I know that doesn't mean you're completely inactive, too. So maybe what you're up to now as well.

Gene Veith:

Okay. Well, yeah. I'm an English professor. Taught in Christian schools for a long time, and I have been interested in the connection between Christianity and literature. And that got me to writing about Christianity in the arts, that got me into writing about Christianity and culture. So that got me into all kinds of things, including education, as I'm sure we'll talk about.

So I taught at Concordia University, Wisconsin, for most of my career. Then I wrote for World Magazine full-time as a cultural editor, and then I took a position at Patrick Henry College and not as an English professor, but I was the provost, and we had a really good classical true core curriculum at Patrick Henry, and so I was there for almost ten years, and a few years ago I retired, and so now I'm back in Oklahoma where I grew up originally, and close to some grandchildren live in the same town that I am keeping really busy, and now I have time to write and do other things that I really didn't have time to do when I was busy earning a living. So yeah, that's where I am now.

Marlin Detweiler:

Well, my experience with you is that writing is exactly what you do best. What are you writing now?

Gene Veith:

Well, I'm kind of between big projects. I've got a lot of articles and things I'm supposed to be working on, my blog, and I’m devoting more and more time to that. The Cronut blog. What I'm doing now, I was involved with a big project, a translation of the London Writings by Johann Haman, who was a Christian thinker that's been rediscovered by philosophers and other people writing back in the 1700s, is the greatest critic of the Enlightenment and rationalism and Haman turned out as a very strong, strong evangelical Christian. And a lot of what he was doing was just applying Christianity in a very high level, the word of God, the centrality of Christ in a very unique, fresh kind of way. Anyway, most of his writings aren't translated, but I've been working with John Clottey, the Australian theologian, on an English translation of the work where Haman talks about his conversion, and you see a lot of his basic Christian ideas.

The London writing. The book has come out. I'm the editor there, so there is a lot to do. Getting out the Kindle version, and I'm trying to shepherd that through, which is a big pain I'm discovering. But that'll be the result for too long.

Marlin Detweiler:

That's wonderful. Well, you have been a key person in the resurgence and recent interest in classical Christian education. Give us a sense of how that came about for you.

Gene Veith:

Yeah, well, I appreciate those words. Yeah, I've been interested in the liberal arts kind of on the collegiate side for a long time, which is not the same as what is coming out in our schools so much and so much more to it than I realize. But I had put together an integrated humanities program for our adult learning program at Concordia, Wisconsin.

And so we had a class on the ancient Greeks, and so we were studying all these good things in the classical Middle Ages and so on. But my first class, you always go around having the people in the class introduce themselves, and say why they're taking the course. And one of the students said he's taking this course because he wants to start a classical school.

Marlin Detweiler:

Oh, really?

Gene Veith:

That’s right. And again, knowing nothing about this and thinking that that was highly unlikely. But then I had him a year later in another one of these courses, and he said he had started a classical Christian school, and it was Andrew Kern.

Marlin Detweiler:

Oh my goodness.

Gene Veith:

He told me about the school he started in Green Bay, Wisconsin, where a lot of the Green Bay Packers were sending their kids. So I got interested in this, and he invited me down, and I went to the Providence Academy in Green Bay, and I was just astonished to see the academic level of these little kids and what they could do.

So that got me interested, and I did more research and learned more about it, and Andrew helped me with that. And I wrote an article about this for the Kepler Research Center, which is a conservative think tank that looks for conservative alternatives to different issues.

And then, it was a very popular article, and Capital Research Center asked me to expand that into a monograph. Into a book, yeah. So I knew Andrew knew more about it than I did, so I asked if he wanted to work together on it. They gave us a grant allowing me to travel a little while to different places, to study some of these schools. And one of them was, uh, Geneva Classical School in Orlando, Florida, where I met you, Marlin.

Anyway, that turned into a little book we did Classical Education published by Kepler Research Center, and it just surveyed a lot of the different ways this was being carried out. And yeah, just one thing led to another. And that's how I got involved in the classical Christian education.

Marlin Detweiler:

That's really neat. Well, part of that relationship that we established turned into a couple of different points of connection. I know that we had you come to Lancaster, Pennsylvania. I believe that you were the keynote speaker for one of our teacher training conferences that we used to do. And you may have been there to speak at a fundraising banquet as well.

I don't remember if that was the case or not, but the thing that I do remember quite well was your involvement in our integrated humanities curriculum called the Omnibus. As you may recall, we had two publishers excuse me, two editors, and I functioned as the publisher, as did our business. And in the process of doing that, the first three books were done, and we realized we could use more hands on deck.

And so the last three books, the books, of course, for 10th, 11th, and 12th grade or Omnibus IV, Omnibus V, and Omnibus VI, were books that you were a part of editing and writing for and played a key role. I guess a good starting point is to ask why that project interested you enough to be a part of it.

Gene Veith:

Well, I really got a lot out of being part of the Omnibus project. I mean, giving classical education to people, this is a huge thing, and it's so important, and it's getting such great results, but very few, even of the teachers, have had a classical education themselves. And also, for the homeschoolers, most parents haven't had the kind of education that they want to give to their kids.

And it's true that when you study the great heritage, the great heritage we have in our civilization and the great heritage we have as Christians, it's so important to transmit this. But you need to have a guide. You need to have someone to give you the background and point out things. I think of in Dante, there's a Virgil sort of taking Dante by the hand, pointing out what he needs to look at and explaining what is what he's seeing.

And you sort of need that to really get the heritage that we have. And the beauty of the of the Omnibus books is that they have that not only does it give you the introductions and the guiding, the guidance through the great works of our of our civilization and the Christian faith, but it gives lessons and assignments, things.

And these, too are guiding students so that they're realizing for themselves and applying for themselves what these things are all about. And so it's just a beautiful thing. And I love the production of them. The illustrations are just gorgeous, and it's just a very fine book in an age where we've kind of gotten away from books in general.

So I was happy to be a part of it. We would meet as the editors to say, “Okay, we need to cover this. How do we know that. Got to handle this topic, that topic.” And sometimes when we couldn't think of anybody, we had to do it ourselves. And I enjoyed writing about some of my favorites, John Milton's Paradise Lost and Dante, I believe I wrote some on him and even other topics like Aristotle's Views of Tragedy.

And these are all really favorites of mine. And it gave me a chance to kind of say what I wanted to say about them. And it was just a good forum. But again, when it all came together, another thing I got from it was reading the other essays. There was one on mathematics that was one of these paradigm-shifting experiences for me, pointing out that, you know, mathematics is a mental construct.

It's a mental thing, and yet somehow, it applies and perfectly describes the outside world. How could that be? And I realize that the reason is, is that because there's a mind behind the objective universe, and we know who that is. And it isn't just that one thing or another shows intelligent design or creation or whatever, but everything does. Mathematics does. And that was, so paradigm-shifting for me. But I mean, you have that kind of thing just in the in the Omnibus Series.

Marlin Detweiler:

What you're referring to there, for our audience, is that we included in books four, five, and six, the books intended for 10th through 12th-grade students, I think 24 or 26 essays on various topics or career paths as a way of helping students shape their thinking about where they might go career-wise. And they were all written from a biblical worldview.

We took the initiative. You may have seen it, to assemble them into a single volume also that we I think actually give away called the Vocatio. And we give it away, I think, by going to our website. And if you just sit there in part, you'll get a pop-up, which will allow you to select getting a free copy of it by giving us your email address.

So just a sense of how that's a given away. Also, candidly, I'm a little disappointed sometimes that there hasn't been more traction or more interest in those things because I thought they would be of immense value. Maybe they are, and I just haven't heard. But I'm really glad to hear that a literature guy loves the math one.

Gene Veith:

That's right. And that's one of the things I learned from classical education in general, that everything links together with everything else on the kind of progressive education that has dominated the public schools, and everything else is highly specialized, you know, a lot maybe about a real about a little and yeah, you need to specialize at some point for the career and so on.

But to really understand, you need to see how literature and math and history and philosophy and theology all tie together. And that's the great beauty of it. And it gives you an understanding in a very broad and rich way. And mathematics. Again, I always thought the liberal arts just meant humanities, but whereas the Trivium is, is about language, grammar, logic, and rhetoric, the Quadrivium - arithmetic, geometry, music, and astronomy are all about how mathematics play out.

And so the mathematics people say, “Oh, you don't need to study the liberal arts, we just need STEM courses.” Well, science and technology emerge out of classical education too.

Marlin Detweiler:

They do know people don't realize that it's a very good thing.

Gene Veith:

Yeah, I don't know if they can be sustained even as things are going in our in public schools, and the education theory it's just devolved into political indoctrination. And, you know, if we're even going to have scientists and mathematicians and technologists, they too need a classical education.

Marlin Detweiler:

Yeah, I couldn't agree more. I want to refer to an instance. I don't know if you'll remember it, but it had me laughing out loud. One of your, I believe, editing someone's work on a Shakespeare piece. And your comment was, “No, no, no, no!”Indicating that they had missed the point of something. Do you remember that? Can you relate?

Gene Veith:

Without a doubt.

I make comments like that. I’ve graded so many papers over the course of my long career that they kind of run together, and the editing, I guess is right.

Marlin Detweiler:

Well for our audiences sake, to at least take away some of the mystery. I don't remember which work it was, but you made the clear point that we were not through the work that had been done on that piece. We had missed the point. Then you went on to talk about what it was. And it required some significant editing, but that was the safety, and the expertise that came from you and the others that were part of the editorial team.

And I think it's one of the reasons why the Omnibus curriculum has been so successful, and people are using it. It has so much timelessness to it. And you, you really helped to make sure that that became what it is.

Gene Veith:

Well, yeah, I'm glad to hear that. I appreciate that.

Marlin Detweiler:

Other writing that you've done has really been significant to the classical education movement. Is your work in the Turning Point series. You had two books as a part of that? I think maybe three, actually. I know it was three. I missed that. But I know I know you wrote Reading Between the Lines, State of the Arts, and Postmodern Times.

Tell us a little bit about the Turning Point series and then each of those books and what you were trying to accomplish with them.

Gene Veith:

Well, the purpose of it, Crossway, and they'd gotten a grant also to put together some series of books relating different fields to the Christian faith and Christian worldview. And I had written one where they asked me to write the one about literature. I had done some other writing, kind of doing that a little bit. But this let me address Read Between the Lines.

Marlin Detweiler:

Between the Lines. The one you're referring to about literature.

Gene Veith:

Yes. And that was a Christian guide to literature. And then I had earlier written a little book for InterVarsity called State of the Arts about a biblical perspective on art. And Crossway asked me to do that, to do one on art and. Well, no, no, no. I proposed that because I had written that one about that, and it had gone out of print, but I expanded it into State of the Arts, from Bezalel to Mapplethorpe.

So that was one. And then finally two. They were right coming to the end of that series and one of the one more to finish it off. And there was something at the time, a phenomenon happening in the culture, in the academic world, in the arts world: postmodernism. And now that's fairly well now. But at the time, I think mine was one of the first ones to really approach it from a Christian perspective.

There were Christians writing books thinking they could be postmodern and didn't really see the problems with it.

I wrote Postmodern Times, and which was a Christian guide to contemporary style and culture. And applying that to Omnibus, I was shocked and amazed, thrilled, but sort of appalled that Postmodern Times ended up in the Omnibus program.

Marlin Detweiler:

But it was a great book.

Gene Veith:

Yeah, to think that the book I did is a great book up there with Milton and Shakespeare and the others was kind of confusing to me. I think it's a good book, maybe even a pretty good book. I don't know if it's a great book, but I'm happy to be included in that company.

Marlin Detweiler:

Well, it was certainly a book and remains a book that has the impact that it needs to help shape student thinking in today's culture about the Great Books. And so I do understand your comment. And time will tell if 500 years from now people are reading Gene Edward Veith on postmodern times. But it was an important and remains an important work, as far as I'm concerned, in helping students understand why we are where we are.

Gene Veith:

Well, that makes me feel really good. I appreciate that. Hopefully, if we last 500 years, postmodernism will be dead and gone, and only historians like me would like to study the folly of that time in the 21st century.

Marlin Detweiler:

Yeah, yeah! I want to make a note about one of the other books, too. State of the Arts. When I read that first, it was the first time that I had been confronted with a very effective argument, one that moved me to agree that we can, we can have a sense of art being good and bad and even non, that is. It's really not art, in an absolute sense.

Gene Veith:

Yeah.

Marlin Detweiler:

And that was a new way of thinking about art. And it's proven to be so important in how we think about esthetics. After all, if God made something and it was good, we can understand it. If something wasn't, it was made by a human; it might be inferior to something that God made. We have a sense of which some things can be esthetically better and worse, relatively speaking, and being able to put that in some real objective and concrete terms was very helpful in an area that tends to be thought of even by Christians and maybe particularly by Christians in subjective terms.

What have you learned from that time to today about that kind of evaluative process and understanding?

Gene Veith:

Well, you know, postmodernism is relativism just in the word, and in classical terms, we talk about the true, the good, and the beautiful, and the postmodernist say that truth is relative. And of course, Christians said, no, it's not. It's absolute. Like postmodernism to say that the good is relative. And Christians say no, moral absolutes. And you know, quite rightly, but it never, never are that Christians even tend to agree with postmodernist when it comes to beauty.

The beauty is relative and so in thinking like that, that's actually a kind of a open door that can lead to the other kinds of relativism, and beauty and esthetics is often today, especially a real battleground for accepting what's good and what's true also. So, yeah, so Christians shouldn't be relativists of any kind, including when it comes to beauty.

Marlin Detweiler:

Can you give us some principles of beauty being beautiful?

Gene Veith:

Well, there are certain kinds of universal traits. For example, there's the issue of unity and complexity of those together. Yeah. So some works are very simple. They have unity, a black canvas that has unity but doesn't have complexity. Yeah, you have another modern art, you know, the random paint splashes of abstract expressionism that has complexity but no unity.

The greatest works have both. And you look at a great classic painting. By the way, art does not just refer to painting, it refers to music and, of course, literature and the rest that the great have a unity fit together. And yet when you look at it closely, there are all these elements going on, and they all contribute to the whole.

And so great music is like that. You take a piece by Bach, it has this great impression, magnificent impression, and yet there's so many things going on, and so it can occupy you. And in a way is that you know, a simple, you know, a pop song with three chords just doesn't do. It just doesn't. And that's why another category is the sublime.

The sublime is something that's so great. It just takes your breath away. Burke and others wrote about Sublime. This is what’s awe-inspiring. You know, you look at, you know, the Grand Canyon: that's sublime. Just blows you away. There's art that's like that, too. And literature like Milton's Paradise Lost or paintings like the Sistine Chapel, things that just knock you out.

And that's, you know, we use “awesome” as a term for something really good. “Oh, that's an awesome hamburger.” We've lost a whole category of magnificence and greatness and that's a shame. But again, you have that in the classical approach to art, literature, music, and esthetics in general.

Marlin Detweiler:

That's I know that I put you on the spot there, and you answered well. Those are some really great principles for us to take and apply as we think in terms of aesthetic elements having a real sense of greatness.

Gene Veith:

Let me give you one more example if we have time. The great writer about Sublimity was a Greco-Roman writer named Longinus back a few decades before Christ. And he said so he was explaining all this, how it works. And he said, you know, the most is the most sublime passage of literature can be found in the Hebrew Bible.

And he's not a Christian. He said, it begins, “And God said, Let there be light. And there was light.” And so he analyzes that. He says, “The language is so simple, and yet it's conveying the most incredible, awe-inspiring possibility to go from darkness to light. And it does so in such a simple way.” And anyway, he went on to that and of course, the creation of the universe.

Yeah, that is sublime, and nothing beyond that. But it was so great that a classical esthetic thinker, not a Christian, would recognize that and point it out to ourselves.

Marlin Detweiler:

That is awesome. We're running out of time. But there's one question I have to ask you, and I'll ask you to be brief, but I've got to hear you answer this. What are your hopes now for classical Christian education?

Gene Veith:

Well, as I see contemporary education just falling apart, classical education is the one area in the culture wars that Christians are actually winning, lost on same-sex marriage, losing on abortion, all these other things. But in education, this is where Christians have the advantage. And when Christians and our Christian young people become the best educated and the very time that the non-Christians are descending into just ignorance and barbarism and, you know, knowing nothing, really, who's going to have the advantage? The culture makers.

Marlin Detweiler:

We’re creating some leaders.

Gene Veith:

We really are. And to have an educated people, the educated people are always the ones that lead the culture and the society and the business and everything else. And everybody, you and the listeners and homeschool parents, and I think some of them maybe don't realize the significance of what they're achieving. And when Christians -

Marlin Detweiler:

Hard to when you’re in the middle of it, isn't it?

Gene Veith:

That's right. It is. It really is going to be giving Christianity a chance to influence the culture like we had been doing for centuries and centuries and centuries. And we could do that again.

Marlin Detweiler:

Absolutely. Today we've had Gene Edward Veith with us. Thank you so much for joining us. This is Veritas Vox, the voice of classical Christian education. Thank you again, Gene.

Gene Veith:

Yeah, it's my pleasure.