The Lost Seeds of Learning: Grammar, Logic, and Rhetoric as Life-Giving Arts

<p data-mce-fragment="1" style="text-align: center;" data-mce-style="text-align: center;"><strong data-mce-fragment="1"><em data-mce-fragment="1">“I<span data-mce-fragment="1">f we lose the ability to imagine how words are like seeds, we risk presuming that language cannot serve any purpose greater than our own. If we cannot imagine how human words can communicate self-giving life, then we lose the ability to imagine how Christian faith is possible.”</span>

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<strong data-mce-fragment="1"><meta charset="utf-8">The verbal arts of grammar, logic, and rhetoric are often referred to as tools of learning. But this analogy between words and tools too often relies on the common assumption that the verbal arts are merely neutral tools. Even reimagining the verbal arts as purposive tools that serve a good beyond themselves takes us only so far. We need an alternative analogy to stand against the cultural forces of consumption and production that often shape educational purposes in the age of global information technology. Thus, rather than tools, words are like seeds whose purpose is life-giving.

The Lost Seeds of Learning invites readers to consider how our understanding of the learners, the teachers, the content, the forms, and the purposes of the verbal arts becomes transformed in light of Christian faith. Recovering the vision of how grammar, logic, and rhetoric can be like seeds and not merely neutral tools helps us remember why these arts are crucial to Christian formation. These arts have an intrinsic purpose not of human choosing and a particular purpose to communicate new life. Such life communicated is a divine gift and the form of such communication can be self-giving. Such verbal giving and receiving is a living knowledge that relies on the testimony of particular persons over time. By imagining words as seeds, Christian educators can cultivate attention, patience, and responsible action rather than distraction, impatience, and paralysis. 

Phillip J. Donnelly, PhD, is professor of literature in the Honors College at Baylor University, where he teaches in the Great Texts Program and the English Graduate Program and serves as the director of the Great Texts Program. His research focuses on the historical connections between philosophy, theology, and imaginative literature, with particular attention to Renaissance literature and the reception of classical educational traditions. He is the author of <ahttps://amzn.to/3bLXtES>Milton’s Scriptural Reasoning</a> (Cambridge University Press, 2009), and is coeditor, with D. H. Williams, of <https://amzn.to/3qdWJkn>Transformations in Biblical Literary Traditions</a> (University of Notre Dame Press, 2014). He serves on the national council for the Alcuin Fellowship and on the editorial board for Principia: A Journal of Classical Education.