Why Classical Christian Education Will Save This Country
Editors’ Note: This essay is adapted from a talk for the Society for Classical Learning at Capstone Classical Academy in Fargo, North Dakota, on March 12, 2026.
Larry Arnn, the president of Hillsdale College, wrote recently about a young man at the college named Luke who has started an organization named after the 12th Legion Fulminata of ancient Rome. The emperor Lucinius put members of the 12th Legion in freezing water to die unless they renounced Christianity. In memory of that Legion, Luke and the members of his group go out to a lake in freezing weather before the sun rises and stand in the water singing hymns and reciting Bible passages.
Arnn writes, “This is a very young-mannish thing to do, but what do they learn from it? To serve. To be strong. To be free. To look up. These are the kind of young Americans who will save our country.”
These young students’ steely determination to embrace suffering in pursuit of virtue calls to mind C. S. Lewis’s favorite philosopher, Boethius. Chris Armstrong has written that Lewis thought of himself as a British Boethius because both were living on the cusp of a dark age and both believed the wisdom of the Greco-Roman classics provided sanity in an age overrun by barbarians.
Boethius was a sixth-century Christian scholar who was exiled and then imprisoned, later executed, on false charges by Theodoric the Ostrogoth, an Arian who was virtually the emperor of the western Roman empire. Lewis was deeply moved by Boethius’s argument in his Consolation of Philosophy that only a fool lets external events determine his happiness. A wise person, Boethius contends, realizes that it is the nature of fortune to change throughout life, and that while good fortune “deceives, bad fortune enlightens.” It “frequently draws men back to their true good [God] like a shepherdess with her crook.” It also shows you “when you have really found the most precious of all riches—friends who are true friends.”
This is why it was Boethius’s plan—before he was executed—to translate all of Aristotle and Plato into Latin to make them available in the popular language for Christians needing wisdom in an age of barbarians. It is also why C. S. Lewis moved from Oxford to Cambridge to accept the Chair of Medieval and Renaissance Philosophy in 1954. The medievals spoke about truth, beauty, and goodness in ways that could fire the minds and souls of modern students and give them the fortitude to do the right thing while Nazi bombs were being dropped on Britain.
But even apart from the War, Lewis said in a sermon during the war (“Learning in War-Time”), it is always good to study the great books of the past, if for no other reason than to confront the question of heaven and hell. He paused after the last word: “You must forgive me for the crude monosyllable. I know that many wiser and better Christians than I do not like to mention heaven and hell even in a pulpit.”
The war, Lewis went on, raises political and strategic questions, but none as important as the fact that we are “creatures who are every moment advancing either to heaven or hell.” So how can we spend time on “such comparative trivialities as literature or art, mathematics or biology”?
We must remember, Lewis preached, that the war creates no new situation but “simply aggravates the permanent human situation so that we can no longer ignore it.” Life has never been normal, and every culture “has always had to exist under the shadow of something infinitely more important than itself.” If people had to wait to search for knowledge and beauty “until they were secure, the search would never have begun.”
But men have always sought the good, the true, and the beautiful during difficult times. “They propound mathematical theorems in beleaguered cities, conduct metaphysical arguments in condemned cells, make jokes on scaffolds, discuss the last new poem while advancing to the walls of Quebec, and comb their hair at Thermopylae.”
Lewis told his church audience that when he was in the trenches in World War I—where his best friend was killed right beside him—“I found that the nearer you got to the front line the less everyone spoke and thought of the allied cause and the progress of the campaign.” Tolstoy and the Iliad, he said, say the same. Life goes on, and thinking about what is good and beautiful, even amid war, rarely stops.
We Christians are always to pursue “knowledge and beauty, in a sense, for their own sake, but in a sense that does not exclude their being for God’s sake.” This means we can have “the confidence that by so doing we are either advancing to the vision of God ourselves or indirectly helping others to do so.”
How do we help others advance to a vision of God by a classical education? Lewis says we can accomplish this by learning good reasoning that will fight bad reasoning. There are the “cool intellects” that advance bad reasons to fight the good, true, and beautiful, and there are “muddy heathen mysticisms which deny intellect altogether.” But by participating in this intellectual fight, we help those who want reasons to stay on the narrow way but have never heard the good ones.
It is also important to have intimate knowledge of the past “to remind us that the basic assumptions [about life and the good and beautiful] have been quite different in different periods and that much which seems certain to the uneducated is merely temporary fashion.”
By “intimate knowledge of the past,” Lewis meant reading not just about past cultures, but to read the best minds directly, especially those in what some have called “the long Middle Age” that lasted until the beginning of the eighteenth century. In his essay “On the Reading of Old Books,” he wrote:
It has always therefore been one of my main endeavors as a teacher to persuade the young that first-hand knowledge is not only more worth acquiring than second-hand knowledge, but is usually much easier and more delightful to acquire.
Thus the value of a classical Christian education that reads not just about the classical and Christian thinkers but that reads those thinkers themselves. This assertion of truth among the pagans is a stumbling block for many Christians. How could they have had any true knowledge without knowledge of the Savior? Early Christian thinkers asked the same.
Justin Martyr, for instance, concluded that these pagan thinkers were learning from the Messiah in his role as Logos or Word of the cosmos, since John’s Gospel informs us that the Logos “enlightens everyone” (John 1:9). The Logos, Justin posited, was speaking through the philosophical religions of the ancient world such as Platonism and Aristotelianism. This would explain their errors, such as Aristotle’s saying the world is eternal, since they did not know the whole Logos, which is the Messiah himself. They saw the trees but not the forest. They acquired truths but out of context. They participated in only part of the Logos rather than possessing the person of the Logos.
Clement of Alexandria was another Christian philosopher trying to make sense of the partial truths he found in these Greek philosophies. Clement believed that these Greeks knew the accidents (qualities not essential to a thing) but only Christians knew the essence. The philosophers named God, but only Christians knew God. Or the Greek thinkers knew the true God only dimly. They had only faint knowledge of God the Creator without knowing God the Redeemer.
More recently, Joseph Ratzinger has proposed that in his mysterious providence the Triune God arranged for Greek philosophy to collide historically with the religion of the God of Israel and his Messiah. For Greek philosophy put the question of truth to its audience rather than resting content with traditional polytheisms and their fables of gods and goddesses. The Greek philosophers developed faith in a single God and criticized popular notions of the gods. This question of the true and the good is what unites the Greek and biblical worlds: they made the Mosaic/Socratic distinction between what was believed about the true and the good on one hand, and what they ought to believe about the true and the good on the other.
This collision began, Ratzinger has argued, when Jews translated the Old Testament into Greek to create the Septuagint. This started the process of intercultural encounter, and with vast implications. It demonstrated the harmony between God and world, reason and mystery. The God of Jerusalem was now speaking in the words of Athens, and views of God and goodness and salvation could be compared and examined. This was the same process used in some of the Wisdom books of the Apocrypha such as Wisdom and Ecclesiasticus (Sirach), where Platonic and Stoic conceptions of morality were connected to the world created and redeemed by the God of Israel. Now Hellenists who were convinced by Plato that nature points to a world beyond could see higher up to a God of beauty and love in the traditions of Israel.
Robert Luddy is a Christian businessman who has founded classical Christian schools with 6,500 students in the Raleigh, North Carolina area and a classical Christian college called Thales College: a three-year college with two majors, liberal arts and business. In his book Seeking Wisdom: The Road to Prosperity, Luddy explains why his schools are making a difference. “Modern education teaches knowledge, skills, spreadsheets, and algorithms, but falters on the teaching of wisdom. The ancient Greek philosophers understood and focused on wisdom, which is why, after twenty-five centuries, we study and quote Plato, Aristotle, and Socrates.”
The “Luddy schools” teach the necessity of humility to gain wisdom. He quotes his personal friend, philosopher Alice von Hildebrand: “Blessed is the woman, or the man for that matter, who is aware of her, or his, weakness. Self-assurance is the fast road to a fall.”
Humility must be allied to a “relentless pursuit of truth.” That pursuit will always involve asking questions, which God has hardwired children for. The recurring “Why?” of children is perfect for finding truth and wisdom in a classical school where the method is listening to different perspectives and engaging in debate, discussion, and disagreements.
Luddy’s schools also teach servant leadership. These students learn that true leadership involves emotional intelligence (just as or more important than IQ) and self-sacrifice. They learn happiness through service. Above all, they must learn from the order and efficiency of nature. Luddy cites Socrates’ declaration that “wisdom begins in wonder.” Leonardo da Vinci, an example Luddy refers to:
had the blessing of not having any formal education. He made these observations of the natural order, and then he learned the state of the art from the best sculptures, the best painters, and he improved on it. So we should get everybody to think more like da Vinci. He worked hard to perfect his skills to improve the efficiency of products, the beauty of paintings, the beauty of sculpture. He actually was a top-notch engineer, which most people don’t think about. He was a magnificent engineer, but it all came from his observations of the natural order and of highly skilled people. And that’s what we need to turn education into, you know, beyond K–5, where you should learn all the basic skills, but you should at least come out with a sense of wonder and some understanding of the natural order.
A true learner will be willing to take risks to follow that wonder. Every student in the Luddy schools is encouraged to risk being contra mundum, against the world. For it is the “trouble-makers,” the “outliers,” “the disrupters” who are willing to follow a hunch that leads to an idea different from the status quo. Luddy calls it “sparking,” the small clue or hunch that might lead to a big discovery.
Luddy cites Malcolm McLean and Nikola Tesla as illustrations. McLean noticed that trucks loading and unloading at ports were inefficient. He had a hunch that led him to develop containerized shipping. Similarly, Nikola Tesla noticed that direct current (DC) electric power was inefficient and had a hunch that led him to invent and then develop alternating current (AC). He gave up his own royalties (an example of servant leadership) in order to make it a success.
I remember when I was in my PhD program studying the writings of Jonathan Edwards. The mountains of secondary scholarship on Edwards proclaimed that he was happy to let the world outside the church go to hell, in both senses of the word, and that he had no notion of what we would call politics or political theology. I had a hunch that could not be true for a theologian in the Reformed tradition that is typically interested in reordering the world. Following a lead from Harry Stout, who found treasures in Puritan unpublished sermons, I travelled to Yale’s Beinecke Library to explore Edwards’s unpublished sermons. In them I found, lo and behold, that “America’s theologian” had an extensive “public theology.” Many articles and books on Edwards and the public square (see here and here) have been published since that first little hunch.
Classical Christian education will not truly save this country. Only God can. But if God saves this nation from utter ruin, He surely will have used the young men and women being produced by classical Christian schools in this land. For they will have the intellectual firepower and strength of character to reform this nation both politically and socially. And even if other forces should prevail, the graduates of these schools will lead their families in knowing, as Boethius taught, that there are better things than good fortune in external circumstances.