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The argument that the study of Latin and Greek is justified because it disciplines or trains the mind is a weak one. Taken to its extreme it involves the fallacy that training for an activity is separable from that activity itself; that you can train a mind to discover the truth, without the person whose mind it is having to decide whether any part of his experience is in fact true or false. You cannot do this. If you are to learn the truth, or some part of the truth, then you must learn the truth. There is no preliminary activity you can engage in which makes you able to know, without actually knowing anything. The only way to train the mind is to use the mind: and to use the mind you must direct it to something outside the mind : something that is worth while in itself.
How worthwhile then in themselves are Greek and Latin? Simply as languages they have no special magic. If you want to learn a language more firmly inflected than English, you might quite happily learn German. If you want to enter a new world of language, then learn Russian. This does not mean that we should decry the purely linguistic study of Latin and Greek – writing proses, and verse too, if you want. But it should be seen for what it is: a technique, a mental craft.
1 See for example The last two chapters of Studies of the Greek Poets, 3rd edition. London, 1893.
2 Leeding passages are Enneads III. 8. 9-11 and V. 3.17. Some of those who feel at home in Aristotle's philosophy. I suspect have read into it ideas of transcendence taken from a later age.
3 Chapter 57. from McCann's edition.
4 The revival of classical ideas, it could be argued, figures in nineteenth century political writers. John Stuart Mill. Hegel, Marx and Nietzsche, all of whom knew the classics at first hand.
5 As described by de Rougemont, L'amour et l'occident.
6 Sophist 247D-250E.
7 St John 16: 12-13; cf. 15: 25-26.
8 It is obvious I hope that I am not attempting to give a complete account of the development doctrine. The place of reasoned reflection in this explicitation of doctrine, the nature of our collective certainty. and other questions have been left aside.
9 I mean primarily in formal writings on philosophy and theology. An exception is Moberley in his Personality and the Atonement. It is a pity to see this vital work referred to disparagingly by the late Fr Victor White in one of his essays in God the Unknown, p.104.
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