My Experience at Ralston College
Scorching rays flooded every nook of bare land. The wine-dark Aegean pulsed gently, cooling the broiling landscape with fresh ripples of saltwater. I descended a stone stairway and reached a wide terrace. Sweat tickled my neck. I soaked in the view before passing through a doorway. The chair was stiff, the tables low, hips tense from long days of travel. My heartbeat quickened. Around me sat 24 strangers whose looks personified anticipation.
“Χαίρετε.” Chairete. He was wearing a beige linen shirt, sandals, and white pants. Traces of perspiration dribbled down his sleeves. “Πῶς ἔχετε.” Pos echete. A dragging silence. He spoke more decisively, flashing a wide smile at our clueless faces. An endearing putto figure stood near. They began a skit. Scattered hums of comprehension lifted from our breaths. “How are you?” The room chuckled shyly.
Their brief performance preceded a preamble in English. I was too ecstatic to immortalize it verbatim, but I do recall a comment about our textbook, a yellow tome whose cover featured an ancient icon of unknown origin. Day by day, chapter by chapter, we would explore the mythical life of an Athenian farmer and his family, whose exciting peripeties illustrated the grammatical foundations of Ancient Greek. Our purpose, we were told emphatically, was not to rack our brains with every word and every rule of every page, but to “let it wash over” us through active listening, speaking, and a whole lot of reading.
Dr. Conlon’s introduction must have lasted 15 minutes, divided between exchanging furtive looks, taking notes, drying foreheads with paper towels, and gaping at the excitingly confounding situation. After some clarifying queries, we nodded. Then, it resumed. Foreign noises filled the room in rapider sequence. Simple phrases gave way to convoluted sentences. A few registered through our instructors’ amusing demonstrations, or by association with images on a whiteboard. Most flew right beyond us as our tongues struggled to enunciate deceiving sounds veiled in graceful calligraphy.
Two hours later we finished the first of three sessions. I could sense the inception of a bond with the strangers in the room, if only for the incredulous exhaustion our bodies revealed. We would call it immersion. Willful saturation. To be awash. A fierce growling led me outside. The sea persisted as I had last seen it, swaying its way onto the sand and back. I synched breath to wave, searching for stillness. Little did I know this would be my first class at Ralston College.
*
In The Language Instinct, Steven Pinker observed that language “develops in the child spontaneously, without conscious effort or formal instruction, is deployed without awareness of its underlying logic.” Correct though he may be, this insight rarely informs language instruction. For unclear reasons, we often assume that as our brains “mature,” language acquisition should become more “rational” through scrupulous examinations of syntax and rote memorization of scattered lexicon. This approach tries to scaffold knowledge, though it more effectively produces apathy, boredom, and a damaging understanding of language as an inanimate object. Opposite stands the “natural method,” which seeks to replicate children’s speech development. Infants never learn their native tongue from painstaking analysis of grammar. If they did, they would never speak. They rather learn by direct participation—through stories.
As a middle- and high-schooler in Rome, Italy, I attended mandatory English classes four times a week. The curriculum was meant to reinforce foundations I had presumably built in elementary school. To no surprise, my lessons followed the conventional rote method; teachers did 99% of the talking as students sat passively in rows to swig information. Conversation was relegated to one hour out of five, which rarely amounted to anything. It took a transatlantic move to the United States at 15 to realize that my “knowledge” was nearly useless. School in North Carolina was exhausting and discouraging. As I neared fluency, I was puzzled by the correlation between improvement and structured learning. When the latter stopped, the former skyrocketed. Tinkering with syntax in a sterile classroom differs radically from existing in a dynamic space that compels the mind’s continuous adaptation. The world became my academy. Learning was a necessity.
Ever since, I have had the fortune to learn additional languages through similar immersion, whose promising results made me relish initial disorientations. Yet, before that draining morning on the isle of Samos, I had never considered the natural method’s potential for classical languages. Like millions of Italian teens, my mother attended a classical high school (liceo classico), where for five years she studied Latin and Ancient Greek alongside literature and the history of philosophy. When acquaintances find out about this curricular requirement, they often gasp in amazement. Graduating high school with some understanding of the Greco-Roman world is no trite feat. The pedagogy is nevertheless marred by a treatment of classical studies as scientific disciplines, as subjects whose value lies in measurable technical proficiency.
Besides my mother’s occasional references to her maledette tabelle (“cursed charts”), I barely knew what Ancient Greek was before August 2023. The more time I spent studying it, the more I appreciated Ralston’s original response to the soporific norm. As my cohort’s command of the language gradually improved, we began to enact our textbook’s chronicles, wittily jeering at our mistakes and well-intentioned slips of tongue. We raced to answer questions about declensions in a competitive spirit whose ultimate purpose is the benefit of all. We laughed in standing circles, and our teachers laughed with us. Our child-like curiosity was entertained with stories about the genesis and development of words like εὔνοια (eunoia) and ἔρως (eros). These etymological tales almost always involved modern Greek, which we explored alongside its ancient form to discover their substantial continuity. The sheer joy we derived from learning a language in concert turned the loathed memorization of charts into a welcome necessity. Every new expression enabled the possibility of speaking as Plato or Aristotle might have, of speaking with them, to understand them on their own terms; a very, very distant possibility, but one whose conceivable actualization inspired our intellectual efforts. As our classes moved from the Ionian isle to the Peloponnesian port of Nafplio, I rejoiced at the opportunity to learn organically in such a lively community.
Two intense months later we moved to Savannah, Georgia. We began reading the Gospel of John, whose every sentence disclosed Greek’s polysemanticity. After the New Year we encountered the Homeric dialect of the Iliad, which at the time of writing we are perusing alongside Plato’s eclectic Symposium. Each of three trimesters in sunny Savannah finished with a dreadfully exciting writing exam, in which we were given freedom (and a few too many hours) to abridge our texts in the ancient tongue of Hellas.
Our linguistic explorations of the Greek world prepared us for a survey of the Western intellectual tradition, guided by the theme of the “whole.” Every week we devoted our attention to a seminal text as philologia (φιλολογία) made way for philosophia (φιλοσοφία). We read together, whispering sentences under dim lights, reciting passages on porches and park benches, in preparation for intimate seminars. The dialogical nature of our roundtables, where rich and challenging discussions inevitably ensued, primed us for a host of complementary activities. Lectures by faculty and guests enriched our ruminations with provocative proposals; concerts, museum visits, and open-air city tours imprinted ancient concepts onto our surroundings; weekly college-wide meals nourished our communion.
*
At first, Ralston’s approach to the past seemed strange. I was used to confining the value of a text to a particular course. My sporadic exposures to Aristotle or Descartes had satisfied circumscribed interests; they never introduced the possibility of treating these authors as characters of a “story” whatsoever. To the contrary, I had attended a handful of courses where texts like Plato’s Republic were seldom discussed for their historical and practical significance. The tendency was to survey “key points” and stress the sins of the author as unfortunate results of history. I remember one professor whose arbitrary disdain overtook the two days we had to discuss Plato’s cave, obfuscating revealing insights with denunciations of cherrypicked claims as devious and disturbing. I dismissed this episode as an exception to the rule, for fortunate I was to encounter responsible teachers who shunned this shallow attitude, despite their frequent reductions of living texts to propositional content. The same alas cannot be said of a large swath of students who are increasingly exposed to courses that diminish or discredit a period, author, or text on the basis of their contingent origins. A priori distrust has hegemonized the academy, sowing suspicion about the past and our relationship to it.
As a hermeneutical attitude, suspicion was articulated in detail by the French philosopher Paul Ricœur. In Freud and Philosophy, Ricœur summoned three “masters of suspicion”: Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud. What unites these figures is a view of consciousness as “false.” In various formulations, the école du soupçon maintained that apparently straightforward phenomena conceal truths to be mined by subversive scrutiny. In philosophy and literary studies, the wish to bypass deceptive reality begot a fervent skepticism about an author’s ulterior motives. Prose became a spurious artifact, to be distrusted and exposed. Couple this attitude with a widespread dismissal of truth, knowledge, and objectivity, and behold a puzzling relativism that draws energy from a peculiar hermeneutical agenda.
As I proceeded through a detailed inquiry into the Western canon, I came to associate my seminars’ hermeneutical approach with an alternative model, perhaps best articulated by Eric Hirsch. In Validity in Interpretation, Hirsch addressed three groups of “hermeneuticians.” The first is represented by Friedrich Schleiermacher’s Romantic ideal of a text as a medium to commune with its author’s soul. For Schleiermacher, the objective of reading is “understanding in the highest sense,” intended as the direct experience of whatever sentiments the author underwent when penning thoughts to paper. Schleiermacher’s paradigm stemmed from the assumption that we could derive accurate intimations of an author’s affective state, in principle and practice.
The second group, subsumed under the banner of New Criticism, tried to subvert the Romantic hermeneutics. Hirsch attributed this movement’s origin to T. S. Eliot, who suggested that poetry should be “impersonal, objective, and autonomous.” Readers’ responses and authorial intent gave way to highly referential compositions and methodical examinations of structure and content. As John Ransom put it in his 1937 essay “Criticism Inc.,” “criticism must become more scientific, or precise and systematic.” Shrewd inspections of rhyme, meter, setting, plot, and other formally linguistic elements took centerstage in assessing the aesthetic merit of literature’s alleged semantic autonomy. Yet, this overly formalized and impersonal approach mistook the value of a text for the apparent fixity of linguistic symbols. It dismissed what an author means, only to consider what a text says.
Paradoxically, the author’s exile in the name of “objectivity” bolstered such hermeneutic philosophers as Martin Heidegger and Hans Gadamer, who comprise the third group. In his seminal Truth and Method, Gadamer suggested that “not just occasionally but always, the meaning of a text goes beyond its author. That is why understanding is not merely a reproductive but always a productive activity as well.” Reading produces meaning afresh, for it is always situated in a contingent historical panorama that governs a text’s potential interpretations. In the Francophone world, a parallel outlook was developed by Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, and Roland Barthes. Barthes famously proclaimed the “death of the author” in an eponymous essay from 1967. Through a Gadamerian rehearsal, he affirmed that an author “is born simultaneously with the text, is in no way equipped with a being preceding or exceeding the writing, [and] is not the subject with the book as predicate.” If for Gadamer “the discovery of the true meaning of a text or a work of art is never finished; it is in fact an infinite process,” for Barthes a text is “eternally written here and now” by its reader. A similar ethos informed Foucault and Derrida’s hermeneutics, which have influenced humanities departments the world over.
A text is “eternal,” insofar as it survives to be read for and by posterity, and insofar as countless readers may have countless initial reactions to its contents. To sloganize one of Ralston’s tenets: ancient texts are alive, written for us to develop private and therefore inimitable relationships with them. However, a text’s potential for psychological resonance differs from the potential infinity of its putative meanings. An author’s intended meaning, and our more or less accurate readings of that meaning, depend neither on our present emotional state nor on our presumed interpretive omnipotence. The Romantic and “postmodern” hermeneutical approaches represent the reduction of a text to subjective impression and the consequent genesis of hyper-fluid collections of readings. New Criticism illustrates the confinement of a text into interpretive principles that either ban the author or obscure his authenticity.
A healthy hermeneutics bridges the two poles. In our seminars, my classmates and I have often sought “communion” with, say, Dante’s soul as we rendered impassioned readings of Virgil’s farewell speech in the final stages of Purgatory. What must the Florentine have felt when he composed Virgil’s oration about “temporal and eternal fires” that burn within and without as “we await the glad and lovely eyes whose weeping made me come to you”? Technical examinations abound as well. We might dissect the ingenious poetry in the Consolation of Philosophy, or scrutinize Shakespeare’s word choice, or even examine Plato’s innovative use of the middle voice in the Euthyphro. Our discussions have also revealed that we obviously approach a text from different perspectives. Some of us are devout believers, for example, while others are ambivalent about the role of religious institutions conventionally conceived. Our positionality kills the author, if you will; but it does not confine conclusions, for the commitment remains to trust that a canonical text encloses express and eternal seeds regardless of material circumstances. Its fruits are even sweeter when they transcend historicity.
Our reading exercises are as rich as the various hermeneutical strands in this partial survey. Unlike them, however, they revolve around the assumption that, in Hirsch’s words, “a text means what its author meant.” This assumption nurtures a neglected virtue in contemporary academia: charity, or the belief that great classics offer real and consequential truths, and that we should stand in awe before them. Charity allows a text to speak for itself, unencumbered by instrumental agendas or affective distractions. As I sit around oak tables with eager classmates, our books disclose themselves as testaments of humanity’s astounding voyage(s), as earnest essays whose value can reveal itself to us, if we are humble enough to listen.
*
The taunting smell of roasted poultry filled the room with expectation. My mouth was watering after a long afternoon of chats, seminars, and lectures. Clinking glasses induced the unpredictable rhythm of family rituals. Chatter resounded between the beige walls of the gorgeous home where we held our meals. As trays of food populated the counter, the musical among us sang a celebratory hymn. Its last triad signaled the beginning of supper. We collected our plates and formed a line. We gathered food and found our chairs. Talk resumed. Eye contact prompted eager smiles as the logos unfolded. To my right a conversation arose about Hamlet’s erudition and his terrifying inertia. Another group discussed the power of good stories. Others yet reminisced on childhood memories, completing comic sentences with Greek phrases that conveyed the past more faithfully. A soft twilight breeze swayed the Spanish moss. The moon shone softly through the matted windows as the flame of friendship glowed steady into nightfall.
*
The commitment to exploring a long-standing intellectual tradition in the charitable spirit of fellowship is rarer than it should be. It once fueled prestigious universities like Harvard and Princeton. Today, the tendency is rather to abandon the very notion of a canon in favor of a politically charged “criticism,” or to nullify the public import of a text by smothering it with specialization. This peculiarly modern reduction of humanistic disciplines to instrumental subjects has degraded a fertile cultural heritage to an expired collection of textual cadavers. In worst cases, the canon is dismissed as a reprehensible product of historical contingency to be effaced for good, or a brand to be wielded for ideological programs. Such a paradigm shift has produced apathy and antipathy toward a rich tradition and the collegiate ethos its embodiment requires, hence the occasional disavowal of classical languages.
In my explorations of an idiom so overwhelmingly humbling as Ancient Greek, I have come to share the humanists’ belief in language as a medium for spiritual growth and historical awareness. From puzzlement before such simple phrases as “Hello everyone” and “How are you?” my classmates and I have been able to engage foundational texts in their original forms. Every day we admire their capacious beauty and recognize crucial nuances that inevitably fade in translation. Ralston’s appreciation for classical languages as portals into a living tradition has transformed dead, dusty tomes into wonderful breathing companions. Difficulty abounds, for learning is the matter of a lifetime; but its pursuit hinges on an all-too-scarce conviction that genuine humanistic studies can transmute the human, for good.
Although analytic programs and political zeal are not inherently nefarious, they are inadequate guiding principles of a humanistic education. Cicero thought that the studia humanitatis, which included “mathematics, music, knowledge of literature and poetry, and the doctrines of natural science, ethics and political science,” could elucidate the human condition. This illuminating spirit animated a series of Renaissances, the earliest of which blossomed on Italian soil. In each epoch, a people’s relationship with the past was formed and reformed through both a challenge to and a humble acceptance of the astoundingly profound fusion of Greco-Roman and Judeo-Christian roots. 14th– and 15th-century figures like Francesco Petrarca, Leonardo Bruni, and Poggio Bracciolini sought to revive dormant antiquity through the study of languages and classical literature. Universities were essential to this enterprise. The very word college finds its Latin roots in col- (with, together) and legere (to read aloud, to collect, to gather). The college sanctioned free association and safeguarded the freedom of thought on which it depends. Its paramount purpose was to facilitate communion with an intellectual heritage. Such an endeavor is only possible through a charitable commitment to a deep and energizing tradition that places texts before politics.
Of course, we can read Plato’s Symposium in English and still sense its literary majesty. We need not be masters of Homeric Greek to appreciate the Iliad. Who could claim that title, anyway? The purpose of rigorous engagement with primary sources is not to breed an aristocracy whose status feeds on esoteric knowledge, though I admit that Ralston’s overly ceremonial aesthetic often suggests so. It is rather to cultivate a serious sense of history and an informed respect for a series of formative texts. T. S. Eliot, who was well aware of language’s depths, knew that this cultivation demands much. As he wrote in his 1919 essay “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” “tradition […] cannot be inherited, and if you want it you must obtain it by great labour. […] the historical sense involves a perception, not only of the pastness of the past, but of its presence.” Therefore, “the poet must develop or procure the consciousness of the past,” as does, we might add, the singer, the politician, the journalist, the professor, the student. One way to procure the consciousness of the past is to learn its languages. Another is to engage great works with serious charity (and a good dose of playfulness). Voegelin, too, recognized the importance of these orientations when he spoke of “paradigmatic” history, which, unlike the “pragmatic” succession of chronological events, tracks the development of a people’s metaphysical axioms. Tradition is the spiritual substance that enables the human to flourish. The preservation of a coherent tradition supersedes chronology. It requires private citizens committed to the possibility of uniting around a “compact experience of truth.” Before clinging to premature conclusions about the truth, we can at least assume our search should begin with those who came before us.
Anicius Manlius Severinus Boethius would have agreed. To reconcile Plato and Aristotle’s teachings with Christian theology, the statesman began translating Greek works into Latin. The Roman Empire had been undergoing a disheartening decay. Its Western domain collapsed definitively right before Boethius’ birth. A symptom and a cause of this decay was the gradual estrangement from the Greek foundations that had bolstered Rome as a cultural and political epicenter. In the West, Boethius was one of the very last people to be fluent in Greek, if not the only one. He believed in a philosophical tradition, which he could not have transmitted without studying its language. His project was terminated prematurely by a tragic execution, but his spirit lives on.
Eliot and Boethius’ belief in the past was inspired by a humanistic recognition that poetry, literature, and philosophy are gifts of consciousness whose primary purpose is the intimation of what it means to be human. They knew that the loss of connection with a tree of shared humanity would precipitate historical amnesia and civilizational disintegration, and thus impede humanity’s organic flourishing. Charity and fellowship are not mere abstractions. As my professors fondly repeat, we read to befriend the ancients. It is shameful how far we need to search for educational spaces that embody this ethos. Fortunately, independent enterprises like The Polis Institute in Jerusalem, the Accademia Vivarium Novum in Rome, the Paideia Institute in New York City, the recently established University of Austin, and a dozen or so private colleges in North America are gaining momentum as they seek to facilitate a living and honest relationship with the humanities.
Much like Boethius’ times, ours are replete with strife. We yearn for what expediency and industrial prowess could never fulfill. The thirst for meaning our estrangement has created partly explains the rise in popularity of Jonathan Pageau, John Vervaeke, Iain McGilchrist, and others who have sought to blaze paths to meaning by stressing the need for retaining mature notions of shared intellectual inheritances. Behind these burgeoning efforts is a recognition that solipsism destroys; that, despite Nietzsche’s injunctions, life cannot prosper in the eternal now.
My immersive studies at Ralston College have located a potential home in a story greater than my self. It begins with the wrath of Achilles and Priam’s heeded plea. It continues through Odysseus’ search for an old but true companion and his fatal marriage to wit, which consigned him to Dante’s Inferno. By twists and turns it traverses the tragic world of classical Greece, Plato’s mythic prose, and Aristotle’s scientific acumen. It crosses late antiquity and the Middle Ages’ prolific production of syncretic works like Plotinus’ Enneads, Thomas Aquinas’ Summa Theologiae, and Shakespeare’s inimitable plays, to land in modernity, with Descartes, Kant, Hegel, Wagner, Eliot, Beckett, and the many figures who populate the modern imagination. The story is intricate, uncomfortable, exhaustively demanding, full of errors and doubts and controversies; telling it involves inevitable mishaps. Even at a serious enterprise like Ralston the dangerous tendency to glorify the past and censure the present looms large. Yet, it is worth articulating, as honestly and charitably as possible, for before sluggish nihilism and pervasive angst; before the disintegrative militancy that vexes public discourse and the mania lurking behind it; before all that is forsaken in this broken world of ours, there are lights in need of kindling, sparks awaiting air. There is freedom to rear on humble soils tilled by ageless friends, whose summons for communion await heed. Ralston College has begun to plant anew, and I hope you, too, will do the same.
The claims expressed in this article belong exclusively to the author.
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