Piety, Gymnastics, and Music | Ep.4
Before one begins the Trivium arts, there are a few more things that must be attended to. For a study in the liberal arts to be productive, one must first engage in a training in Piety, Gymnastics, and Music.
Piety shapes our being and identifies who we are. The entire call of christian life is to piety, because piety is learning to love as God loves. This does not merely mean that we should have warm feelings for others we encounter, but that we should prioritize our lives in the way that God does himself. We must ask ourselves: “do I love what God loves in the way that he loves it.” The most difficult part of this for us as fallen creatures is remembering to love God first above everything.
This education in piety is not something that is to be introduced and taught at the school. This responsibility is placed on the parents guardians of the student and the church. Training in piety ought to take place outside of the classroom, and the teacher’s job is to enforce what is already being put in place elsewhere. A training in piety will teach the student to love truth and goodness. He will not just know intellectually what he ought to do, but he will do it because this standard of living has become part of who he is.
Gymnastics is not referring to the activities people in spandex perform at the olympics. Rather, it refers to the idea of physical training. This incudes things like running, swimming, and climbing. One might wonder what this has to do with education. Often times we moderns tend to think of sports as extracurricular and almost secondary to study. However, the ancients understood that human beings are a composite of a body and a soul. This necessitates an education for the physical as well as the spiritual. Physical discipling affects the soul. It teaches the individual to master his desires, to deny himself unhealthy things he may desire, and to push through difficulty. This is an important part of education that should not be overlooked.
Music is studied both at the beginning of education and again at the end. Music shapes the soul. It affects our sense in a unique way. St. Augustine recognized that contrary to Aristotle that music must be sensed. Studying music is to study order, harmony, and relationship. The notes may be seen visual through an instrument to live in relationship, but it is only through hearing them sounded that one truly benefits from the music. After all, the music is not the thing on the sheet music. The sheet is only there to indicate the sounds that might be. This heard order of music helps to further order our souls, and it is music itself that gets us to the other arts.
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Kevin Clark and Ravi Scott Jain, The Liberal Arts Tradition: A Philosophy of Christian Classical Education
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