Piety’s Place in Education

As the mighty city of Troy burned and was “settling into her embers,” Aeneas watched from

a rooftop, where he had just witnessed the slaughter of King Priam, and he began to worry

for his father and the rest of his family. Escape from the city and a new start seemed to be

the only option. He knew time was quickly slipping away. The entire city would soon be

sacked and all inside would be killed or enslaved. Continuing to fight would be futile.

Recognizing this futility, Aeneas rushed to his family home, evading the Greek enemy

overwhelming the city, and arrived to find his family still alive. Aeneas, seeing his feeble

father, said to him, “So come, dear father, climb up onto my shoulders! I will carry you on

my back. This labor of love will never wear me down.” Aeneas was able to rescue his father

and son along with “throngs of new companions.” These survivors set sail from the

beaches of Troy, and Aeneas would eventually fulfill his destiny as forefather to the

Romans.

This episode, told in the Aeneid by the Roman poet Virgil, exemplifies an important virtue

in ancient Rome: piety. Aeneas is famous for his piety. Virgil assigned the adjective pious

as one of Aeneas’s epithets. Piety, in fact, has been a virtue in most cultures throughout

history. Piety has a strange ring to our modern ears, though. Yet piety is vital to Christian

classical education.

In their book “The Liberal Arts Tradition”, authors Kevin Clark and Ravi Scott Jain put

piety as the foundation for Christian classical education. Piety will lead to a study of the

seven liberal arts, which make up the core of the classical curriculum. These liberal arts

include the Trivium, or grammar, dialect, and rhetoric, and the Quadrivium, or arithmetic,

geometry, astronomy, and music. But, as Clark and Jain argue in their book, “The seven

liberal arts were never meant to stand on their own as the entire curriculum.” The

curriculum, in fact, is made of several other elements besides the seven liberal arts.

Education, they argue, should begin with piety, along with gymnastics and music, continue

through the seven liberal arts, and culminate in philosophy and theology. Their helpful,

though clunky, acronym PGMAPT sum up this paradigm.

Piety, then, is where Christian classical education starts. Clark and Jain admit the word

“piety” doesn’t have a simple definition, but as an initial description they say that piety “signifies

the duty, love, and respect owed to God, parents, and communal authorities past and

present.” While piety, as displayed by Aeneas, was certainly important to ancient Romans,

this virtue has been fundamental to many other cultures throughout human history.

Important because respecting the culture and passing it on to the next generation

preserved the culture.

Within Christianity, theologians like Augustine, Thomas Aquinas, and John Calvin, among

many others listed by Clark and Jain, have argued for the importance of piety in the life of

the believer. Taking the thinking of these theologians, Clark and Jain arrive at a slightly

more precise definition of piety: “the proper love and fear of God and man,” which, as they

point out, should be recognized as aligning with the two greatest commandments as

articulated by Jesus. Any understanding of piety is, however, lost on modern man.

Clark and Jain begin their chapter on piety with a quotation from Richard Weaver that

comes from his important 1948 book “Ideas Have Consequences”. Weaver describes the

modern man as being “impious.” He has taken “up arms against, and has effectively slain,

what former men have regarded with filial veneration.” The modern man has considered

this destruction “as proof of virtue.” Clark and Jain relate this lack of piety to the

revolutionary thinking that has become more prominent in the modern era. This manner

of thinking, or “delight in slaying the past,” emphasizes the present at the expense of the

past.

History has given us nation-altering revolutions such as the French and the Bolshevik

Revolutions, but it also has given use a never-ending string of smaller revolutions. Recent

examples here in the United States include the 1619 Project, which aims to “reframe the

country’s history,” and #DistruptTexts, which is “an effort to challenge the traditional

canon.” These revolutionary forces seek to undermine the virtue of piety and instead put

primary focus on the self and the present. In contrast to this perspective, Weaver defines

piety as “a discipline of the will through respect. It admits the right to exist of things larger

than the ego, of things different from the ego.”

Aeneas had respect for the things larger than his ego. Because of this, he is mostly known

as pious Aeneas. He does, however, have a second epithet that Virgil assigned to him in his

epic: father. It is notable that as Aeneas carried his father on his shoulders out of Troy, he

led his son Ascanius by the hand. By carrying his father, he was honoring the past. By

leading his son, he was preserving his future. He would eventually be considered the father

of Rome, after all. His father’s culture would be passed through himself on to his son and a

new nation.

Clark and Jain, looking back to the ancient Greek concept of Paideia, note the educational

importance of the passing on of culture: “How one generation can pass its culture on to the

next comprised the central question of education.” This is where Christian classical schools

like Knox Academy have a vital role to fill. As Clark and Jain point it, “Piety is the central

tenet of Christian classical education.” Knox Academy embraces piety and strives to have a

school culture that emphasizes a respect for God, others, and the past. In their concluding

words to this chapter, Clark and Jain say, “A Christian classical education must be grounded

in piety.”

Written by Greg Dawson