Paideia Today

William Faulkner is acknowledge to be one of the greatest American authors of the 20th century. His scintillating writing, masterful plots, mesmerizing characters, and shocking perspective make him the other great pioneer of Southern Gothic (along with Flannery O'Connor) and one of the Southern Renaissance's most intriguing voices. In this episode, Drs. Masson and Friesen focus in on one of his best known short stories, "A Rose for Emily," exploring its curious mix of the macabre and the illuminating.

Today we discuss a flagship work of Post-Modernism, Waiting for Godot. This is one of the seminal works which signals the way forward for culture and its art in the Post-Modernist era (1945-2001). We explore the evolution of our current angst, nihilism and vast loneliness. It is easy to dismiss this play as ridiculous, which it is, but that does not keep it from being incredibly important to where we find ourselves today.

J.R.R. Tolkien (1892-1973) is the greatest author of the the twentieth century. At least he is by popular acclaim. In the eyes of the critics and the literary establishment, he has been virtually ignored. In this episode we open what could be a lengthy discussion of this author, seeking to explain the utter divergence of opinion on Tolkien.

Franz Kafka (1883-1924) was a German-speaking Bohemian novelist and short-story writer, widely regarded as one of the major figures of 20th-century literature. His reputation, however, only really advanced in the light of the atrocities of the Nazi regime. Kafka was Jewish. Like Orwell, Kafka's name has become synonymous with the type of world he portrays, in Kafka's case a world operating under an absurd series of conditions in which human freedom is rendered meaningless, and in which human nature becomes utterly dehumanized.

Today's episode focuses on Flannery O'Connor (1925–64), an American writer famed for her 'southern Gothic' style. We will read O'Connor as a Christian realist who portrays the depravity of the human condition with unusual acuity, set as it is in sharp relief against the backdrop of Southern gentility.

In today's episode of Paideia Today, we look at the famed British novelist George Orwell (1903-50), whose work is so harrowing the adjective Orwellian has come to describe the peculiarly modern form of totalitarian technocracy.

William Butler Yeats (1865-1939) was an Irish poet, dramatist, prose writer and one of the foremost figures of 20th-century literature. We spend the majority of the episode looking at Yeats' most famous poem and observe the way it reflects the worldview of his era.

W.H. Auden (1907 –1973) is one of the great poets of the twentieth century. Some regard him as a lesser poet to Yeats and Eliot - we discuss that here - but he was also a prolific writer of prose essays and reviews on literary, political, psychological, and religious subjects. Unlike Eliot, who migrated from America to Britain, Auden did the opposite. His reputation grew after his death as well, which is usually a good sign of merit.

T.S. Eliot has been embraced as a great poet on both sides of the Atlantic. Born in the United States, Eliot emigrated to England and remained there. He became the key figure of the Modernist movement. We discuss Eliot's poetry as well as the movement itself in this week's episode.

Joseph Conrad is an extraordinary figure, not least because he wrote his novels in his second language. His novella Heart of Darkness is justly famous for its depiction of the evil of the human heart in the context of the 'scramble for Africa'. It has been variously described as a 'colonialist' and a 'postcolonialist' novella. While there is no dispute that the expansion of the European powers into Africa is its contemporary context, and there is a critique of colonialism in the text, we dismiss it as reductive to see Conrad's work solely in that light.

Episode 2 of Season four again sets the foundation for the Modernist movement, looking at the two superb poetic craftsman, Thomas Hardy and A.E. Housman. What is noteworthy about the two, besides their aesthetic excellence, is the way they capture a fin-de-siecle cultural despair and express its pervasive sense of alienation. While the First World War will devastate much of Western Christendom, it is important to note that the dissonant notes to the leitmotif of social progress are already being sounded by these two important poets.

Season 4 of Paideia Today begins with the Irish writer Oscar Wilde. Wilde initiates literary modernism, which in turn sows the seeds of a sort of postmodernism rarely discussed by those tracing the history of ideas. It is vital, however, because it connects the pursuit of a rather ugly 'aesthetics' movement with an assault on goodness and truth. Goodness, beauty, and truth have been seen to be connected since the ancient world. But in literary modernism, we see the doctrinal severance of beauty from notions of morality and truth. Horaces's dictum for the poet was 'to teach and to delight'. Wilde's pursuit of delight, however, is presented in an amoral fashion (in keeping with the fashionable agnosticism of his era). It is no accident that the twentieth century was marked by what C.S. Lewis described as 'the Abolition of Man', but also by a total departure from the educational aims of the world prior to then, in pursuit of a transhumanist and often posthumanist ideal.

For the conclusion of season 3 of Paideia Today we look at the Russian novelist Leo Tolstoy. Tolstoy, like Dostoevsky, engages with the modern alienation from life that progressive ideology and commitment to material advances. Rather than one of Tolstoy's magisterial novels like War and Peace or Anna Karenina, we look at his brilliant novella, which addresses themes concerning wisdom and virtue, themes often very much ignored in fiction thereafter.

Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment catalogues the life of a young political idealist who commits two murders to fulfill his ambition. It is an exceptionally subtle and complex narrative, which not only leans on elements of Dostoevsky's own biography, but situates them within a Christian framework of guilt and redemption.

Alfred, Lord Tennyson was the Poet Laureate during much of Queen Victoria's reign and until recently was one of the most popular British poets. But he has been seriously neglected in recent years. In this episode of Paideia Today, we discuss his most important poem.

Today's episode of Paideia Today looks at Mary Shelley's Frankenstein. This fascinating novel represents an amalgamation of various strands of the novel tradition, but arguably begins a new one, that of science fiction. In the process, Shelley also begins a prescient critique of the transhumanist impulse of the modern scientist, or modern Prometheus, as she calls him, and his abandonment of the ethics of love in pursuit of allegedly humanitarian progress.

Jane Austen is without doubt one of the finest prose stylists and keenest observers of human nature. We discuss Austen as a novelist in the light of that eighteenth century genre, noting that her clear satire is what marks her as a great moral writer. The focus of our discussion is her splendid novel Pride and Prejudice, a masterpiece in tracing the lineaments of fallen humanity, and the proud flaws of even its most admirable characters, here represented in the characters of Mr. Darcy and Elizabeth Bennett.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge is credited with giving the definitive take on the imagination, the faculty all the Romantics claim marks their distinctive poetic experiment. But is Coleridge's definition actually more a critique of Romantic poetics than an expression of it? This episode begins by discussing his Rime of the Ancient Mariner, but ranges to discuss a broad array of topics.

William Wordsworth is the poet most strongly identified with a literary movement we call Romantic. Today's episode discusses many of the complex features of that movement while also engaging with some of the work by the great poet.

Samuel Johnson (1709-1784) is a colossal figure who bestrides the age lying between the age of Pope and the Romantics. In acknowledgement of his extraordinary erudition, he is often referred to as Dr. Johnson. Dr. Johnson made lasting contributions to English literature as a poet, playwright, essayist, moralist, literary critic, biographer, editor, and lexicographer. He is an important figure not only for conservative thinking, but the English moral sense tradition. On today's episode, we discuss this much-overlooked but enormously important literary figure.

Jonathan Swift's A Modest Proposal is the finest specimen of the age of satire and wit that succeeds that of Milton's age

This final episode on Milton's Paradise Lost looks at the various ways in which Milton explores the area we now understand under the term psychology, seeing both paradise and hell respectively as the obedient or defiant relations of the character towards God. Milton in that sense 'internalizes' the landscape of the epic, as well as transforming what constitutes epic heroism.

The invocation at the outset of Milton's Paradise Lost announces that he will 'justify the ways of God to men." Yet most anthologies cut Book 3 of Paradise Lost, the Council of Heaven, in which the God explains the rationale for the lost paradise and all the events that ensue. This episode seeks to address what has been lost to a generation of readers of Paradise Lost.

In our third episode on Milton's Paradise Lost, we look at Book 2. We emphasize Milton's theological commitments, rejecting the popular contemporary view that he is mixing our ideas of good and evil, as does the pantheist. Quite the contrary, Milton's depiction of Hell and the creatures banished therein is consistent in following the Augustinian tradition in portraying evil as the privation of everything good. We discuss some of the famous passages and engage with the consequences of their aesthetic misconception by the critical tradition.

In today's episode of Paideia Today, we get into book one of Paradise Lost. We start by looking at his invocation of the Muse, and how he invokes the Classical epics of yore in order to acknowledge the vehicle of epic narrative while at the same time asserting that his is as much greater as his subject, the fall and redemption of mankind, is greater. We then look to the description of the 'geography' of hell and its theological rationale as well as taking an extended look at the mind and character of Satan by attending to a few of his famous speeches.

Season 3 of Paideia Today begins with the colossal figure of John Milton. Milton's Paradise Lost is arguably the greatest poem ever written, certainly the greatest in the English language. The church father Tertullian once famously asked, what does Athens have to do with Jerusalem? Milton's answer would be that theologically speaking it has nothing. Nonetheless, in terms of its literary expression, Milton's Puritanism is inseparably linked with his Classicism. At the same time, the epic form that he uses for his greatest work is transformed by the content of his theological convictions. This is both a work of the utmost religious piety and of aesthetic expression.

In our final installment on Sir Gawain and the Green Knight we move on from discussing the symbolism of number to discussing the symbolism entailed in the 3 beasts that Gawain encounters. The author's artful use of parallelism leads to many interesting talking points throughout the episode

Geoffrey Chaucer is often considered the 'father of English literature.' He is best known for his Canterbury Tales. He was also the first writer to be buried in what has since come to be called Poets' Corner, in Westminster Abbey. But Chaucer was very much a Renaissance man, even before the Renaissance came to England. He gained fame as a philosopher (and as a translator of Boethius) and astronomer, composing the scientific A Treatise on the Astrolabe for his 10-year-old son Lewis. He maintained a career in the civil service as a bureaucrat, courtier, diplomat, and member of parliament. Our podcast will discuss this fascinating figure and also one of his Canterbury Tales.

George Herbert is arguably the foremost devotional lyric poet in the English language. Prodigiously gifted, his intention to serve as an Anglican priest was interrupted by the positions he was offered in public service. He functioned for seven years as Public Orator at Cambridge University before briefly serving in Parliament. He returned to his initial vocation, however, by serving as the rector of the little parish of St Andrew's Church, Lower Bemerton, Salisbury. And it is there that he in all likelihood wrote the personal devotional poems - in English, Latin, and Greek - that are now his greatest legacy. Shortly before his death at the age of 39, he sent a literary manuscript to Nicholas Ferrar, the founder of a semi-monastic Anglican religious community at Little Gidding, recommending that he publish the poems if he thought they might "turn to the advantage of any dejected poor soul", and otherwise to burn them. In 1633, Ferrar published all of his English poems in The Temple: Sacred Poems and Private Ejaculations. They were received with great public approval and reprinted regularly throughout the seventeenth century.

John Donne is an extraordinary literary figure. In addition to his fame as a poet, the foremost representative of the Metaphysical poets, he also served as a soldier. But it was his religious position that made him most famous in his day. Although he had been born into a Catholic family, after considerable reflection he became one of the foremost Anglicans of his day, serving as Dean of St Paul's Cathedral in London (1621–1631). Donne's style is characterised by its drama. Abrupt openings and the use of paradox, irony and syntactic dislocation are commonplace in his writing. These reflect a revolt against the smooth diction and Classical style of Ben Jonson and the Cavalier poets. Donne's discordant tethering of ideas in metaphysical conceits express the eternal conflict between the life of the Christian and the world. But that conflict is not new. What is new are the way he alludes to matters specific to his age, from the ongoing discovery of the new world, to the proto-scientific method of Francis Bacon and the cosmology of Copernicus, to the scepticism of the new philosophy of Rene Descartes

Much of the once most famous renaissance poetry was written by the Cavalier Poets, though most of it is not read today. These were the poets whose motto was Carpe Diem and who epitomize the swashbuckling, devil may care attitude we tend to attribute to the renaissance to this day. What this sometimes obscures is that their poetry is actually enormously subtle, elegant and rich.

Shakespeare's sonnets are comparatively neglected today but they are what Shakespeare himself thought would be his lasting legacy. We look at a few representative sonnets to discuss how they reflect upon Shakespeare's Elizabethan worldview while also playing with the conventions of the Italian Renaissance.

Dr. Masson and Dr. Friesen delve further into this fascinating play on the topics of evil, death and human agency.

In this episode, Drs. Scott Masson and Bill Friesen explore one of the most iconic plays in western history: Hamlet. This Shakespearean tragedy has been considered by many famous authors to be the greatest play ever written.

Geoffrey Chaucer is often considered the 'father of English literature.' He is best known for his Canterbury Tales. He was also the first writer to be buried in what has since come to be called Poets' Corner, in Westminster Abbey. But Chaucer was very much a Renaissance man, even before the Renaissance came to England. He gained fame as a philosopher (and as a translator of Boethius) and astronomer, composing the scientific A Treatise on the Astrolabe for his 10-year-old son Lewis. He maintained a career in the civil service as a bureaucrat, courtier, diplomat, and member of parliament. Our podcast will discuss this fascinating figure and also one of his Canterbury Tales.

In our final installment on Sir Gawain and the Green Knight we move on from discussing the symbolism of number to discussing the symbolism entailed in the 3 beasts that Gawain encounters. The author's artful use of parallelism leads to many interesting talking points throughout the episode

In our second of three podcasts on Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, we explore a wide variety of issues ranging from the appearance of the Green Knight; to the significance of the pentangle on Gawain's shield; to the identity and nature of the two ladies that greet Sir Gawain when he appears in the court on his way to receive his dint from the Green Knight.

We return to our series after a lengthy COVID-induced hiatus looking at the medieval Romance Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. In this first of two episodes we do a great deal of establishing the context of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight.

In today's episode, we begin by looking at cosmology and the medieval synthesis of science with Christian truth in Dante's Divine Comedy. We do so by looking at some pictorial representations of Dante's cosmology in order to be able to visualize Dante's integration of small and, to the modern mind, discrete fields of knowledge. We make it clear that this must be understood allegorically. We conclude this episode by discussing that it is love that moves what appears in the visual portrait to be a static thing. Love is the organizing principle of the whole of the Divine Comedy, and Primal Love, Dante explains, is what organizes the various layers of Dante's portrait of Hell. It is the perversion of God's charitable love (charity) that results in variations of lust (cupidity), which are thereafter justly punished in Hell.

This week's episode begins a series of episodes on the extraordinary work composed at the outset of the fourteenth century by the great Italian poet Dante Alighieri. With his Christian understanding of the soul, Dante's epic poem is an imaginative and moral vision of this earthly life in the light of what will happen after death. The narrative takes as its literal subject the state of souls after death and presents an image of divine justice meted out as due punishment or reward, and describes Dante's travels through Hell, Purgatory, and Paradise or Heaven, while allegorically the poem represents the soul's journey towards God, beginning with the recognition and rejection of sin (Inferno), followed by the penitent Christian life (Purgatorio), which is then followed by the soul's ascent to God (Paradiso). The first episode is a general overview of the verbal architecture of the poem, looking at some of the many extraordinarily well-wrought poetics and its basic motifs. As a humanist, we will emphasize how different Dante's theological and philosophical premises are from a poet who believes that poetry is first and foremost a mode of self-expression rather than an engagement with ultimate reality.

This episode looks at a little-read but fascinating Anglo-Saxon poem called Andreas, named after St. Andrew. Andreas is plainly patterned after Beowulf, but is more explicitly Christian in its literary features, particularly its symbolism. In the tale, Andreas is a missionary to a cannibalistic tribe called the Myrmidonians, who are so savage that they violate the xenia taboo and even eat their guests. Andreas is sent by God to rescue Matthew, who has been thrown into prison and is soon to be eaten. The text is in many ways typological and engaging richly with various Biblical texts, as well as Beowulf. The most important feature of this poem is the way in which Andreas is marked by liturgical elements that demonstrate that its poet is clearly seeking to make his culture Christian, not just his civilization.

This week we discuss monsters and dragons! We begin by examining the qualities of Beowulf as an epic poem before going on to focus upon the three monsters that Beowulf faces. Each represents an aspect of evil more perilous than the last.

The great Anglo-Saxon epic poem Beowulf is the subject of today's episode. We look at the strange history of the document, and its status as an epic. While it is very different than the Greco-Roman epics, we argue that it nonetheless deserves its status as an epic not only because of the magnificent heroism of the character Beowulf, but its sad, elegiac, majestic sweep that engages with notions of monstrosity. It largely owes its rise to fame thanks to the scholarship of the great Medievalist J.R.R. Tolkien. We look at the characteristic features of Anglo-Saxon culture that infuse the epic, and in particular the value of loyalty and a heartfelt patriotic affection for their leader.

A common presentation of the period extending from the fall of Rome until the Renaissance is that of the 'dark ages'. But were the entire Middle Ages actually characterized by oppression, ignorance, and backwardness in areas like human rights, science, health, and the arts? We take issue with the popular misrepresentation of the era. While we do see a dark age following the destruction of the Western Roman Empire, what light remained in it was salvaged by Christians in the monastic movement, which eventually led to the establishment of the university, a medieval Christian institution.

In our first episode of Season 2 of Paideia Today, we look at the now-neglected genre of hagiography, and debunk the popular misconception that medieval hagiography was the product of weak artistry or even a form of propaganda, a type of embellished historical document recording superhuman individuals. We tend to read it as if hagiography were a Christian variation on the nineteenth-century accounts of the lives of great men, as Thomas Carlyle made famous. On the contrary, we explain that authors of hagiographic accounts had no interest in the Romantic obsession with originality as an indicator of artistic merit, or with making their subjects superhuman. On the contrary, they are thoroughly generic in their portrait of virtue and seek to hew very closely to the pattern of imitatio Christi. We mention the lives of St. Paul the Hermit, St. Martin, and St. Anthony as variations of lives patterned upon the well-known deeds of Jesus Christ as recorded in Scripture. The greater the saint, the less exemplary he will be, and the more Christ will be seen in the pattern of his life.

Drs. Masson and Friesen discuss one of the most influential thinkers in western history: Augustine, whose thought undergirds great ranges of the western worldview.

Dr. Masson and Dr. Friesen discuss one of the most famous underworld scenes in western literature: Aeneas' journey to Dis.

In this episode, Dr. Masson and Dr. Friesen discuss what is, beside the Bible, the most influential text in western history: The Aeneid.

In this episode, Dr. Masson and Dr. Friesen discuss one of the most influential plays in western drama.

In this episode, Dr. Masson and Dr. Friesen discuss one of the most influential plays in western drama.

In this episode, Dr. Masson and Dr. Friesen discuss the origins, structure and aims of ancient Greek drama, and its overwhelming influence on the course of western culture.