WATCH, LISTEN, AND READ: Singing a Sweeter Song

Singing a Sweeter Song:
What Odysseus and Orpheus Can Teach Us about the “Moral Imagination”

by Matt Beatty

I’ll begin by asking a question that I often ask parents during conferences: “What if your child could move her grade in this class from a B to an A—but in exchange, she knew 20% less and her interest in learning decreased. Would she take that deal?”

All too often, we both know that the answer is “yes.”

Once this has been acknowledged, we can now discuss an issue that runs deeper than grades: Many times, a student’s struggle isn’t intellectual—what she understands about Romanticism or the Latin subjunctive—but moral.

Classical educators will sometimes refer to a person’s desire for good things, simply because they are good, as their “moral imagination.” When a student comes to prefer achievement to genuine learning, we say that his moral imagination is suffering, even if his grades are not—he wants the wrong set of rewards. I’m picking on grades, but they are just one example of the way in which the moral imagination becomes weak: perhaps your student’s struggle is with phone use, video games, or a desire to be popular.

Opinions vary on who or what is to blame for our taste for the wrong things: Social media? An overly permissive culture? Our forefather Adam? The answer is likely that it’s a team effort on the part of our ancient enemies, the “world, flesh, and Devil.” But while it’s easy to imagine these three driving us toward a “big” sin, it’s harder to see their subtler push toward shallowness.

The liberal arts education that we offer at a classical Christian school is “liberal” because it frees us from shallow desires. The West traded this humane and transformational education for a technical and transactional one a long time ago, and classical educators are working to bring the better education back. However, even those of us pursuing this worthy goal still feel the call to return to Egypt. After all, how much Herodotus, Boethius, Augustine, Dante, Milton, Calvin or Lewis does one need? Why so much reading, writing and…thinking?

The good news is that while students might not love the best things now, this doesn’t mean they can’t learn to love them. But how are we to help them change? How can we teach children to resist the pull of easy delights and to want something that is higher and better?
In answer to this question, I recommend that we look at some of the texts that we assign our students, finding examples from the ancient world that offer both advice and warning to us today.

Good: Use Restraint Like Odysseus

In Book XII of Homer’s Odyssey, we find our hero preparing to make his way past the Sirens, enchanters of the ancient world who lured men to their deaths by the power of their beautiful song. The goddess Circe warns Odysseus about the Sirens with these words: “That man who unsuspecting approaches them, and listens to the Sirens singing, has no prospect of coming home and delighting his wife and little children as they stand about him in greeting, but the Sirens by the melody of their singing enchant him. They sit in their meadow, but the beach before it is piled with boneheaps of men now rotted away, and the skins shrivel upon them.”

The Sirens’ song must be resisted, but how? There are two ways, according to Homer.

First, Circe tells Odysseus to melt wax and fill his companions’ ears with it. The simplest way to avoid lies, evil, and ugliness is not to hear or see it.

This is a strategy that parents can and should employ at times, especially when children are young. However, when they reach adolescence, filling the ear with wax becomes insufficient. You can’t keep the Sirens’ song out of your kids’ ears forever. While we should not intentionally expose our children to wicked things, we have to recognize that they exist all around us (and in us) and we’d better prepare them. Wax isn’t a winning strategy over the long haul.

Second, Circe tells Odysseus to have his men lash him hand and foot to the mast so that he can listen to the Sirens’ song—she knows Odysseus’ curiosity, but she also wants to save him from death.

Don’t we all feel what Odysseus feels? We want to hear or see or feel something that is profoundly enticing, and when we do, we are drawn to it. So we attempt to get as close to it as we can without actually giving in. We try to tie ourselves to the mast by scrubbing our videos for inappropriate words or images, for example, while forgetting that a movie contains a storyline, an ethos, and a prevailing message which isn’t so easily scrubbed from our hearts. It’s commendable and perhaps even necessary to put restraints in place, but this too is not a long-term solution.

Better: Sing a Sweeter Song like Orpheus

Within the classical tradition, we find another example that provides a better alternative. Orpheus was a famed poet and musician—men flocked to hear him, and wild beasts lay peacefully at his feet. Trees, stones, and even the dwellers of Hades were caught up by the power of Orpheus’s music.

During their quest for the golden fleece, Jason and the Argonauts needed to pass the Sirens’ lair and were advised to seek Orpheus’ help. How did he assist them? As the Argonauts passed by on their ship, Orpheus drowned out the Sirens’ song with music that he played on his golden lyre. He offered a sweeter song—one that could overcome spells and enchantments that lead to death. The lesson for teachers and parents is clear: One of the primary antidotes to the world’s temptation is transcendental beauty.

If you don’t think a “sweeter song” is necessary, just do a Google search for the Top 40 songs on the pop charts. Listen to them, and contrast them with songs from 10, 20, or 30 years ago. Pop music is not very edifying in general, but you can easily see the shift toward the exaltation of self and a growing spiritual, moral, and intellectual darkness. Not only do we need to say “no” to this, but we desperately need to suffuse our curriculum and homes with beautiful books, movies, and music that leave us and our students ennobled.

Best: Replace Love for the Sirens’ Song with Love for God

So far, we have seen three ways to resist the “Siren call” of culture: stopping our ears, tying ourselves to a mast, and playing even more beautiful music as a competing call. But the most powerful and longest-lasting “cure” for the impulse to shipwreck one’s heart, mind, and soul to temptation is nothing less than God himself.

The Scottish theologian Thomas Chalmers offers the following observation: “There are two ways in which a practical moralist may attempt to displace from the human heart its love for the world—either by a demonstration of the world’s vanity, so that the heart shall be prevailed upon simply to withdraw its regards from an object that is not worthy of it; or, by setting forth another object, even God, as more worthy of its attachment, so that the heart shall be prevailed upon not to resign an old affection, which shall have nothing to succeed it, but to exchange an old affection for a new one.”

Chalmers understands that laying aside old affections creates a vacuum that needs to be filled—and that the only affection that offers ultimate satisfaction is for God himself. This is the way that we are able to see through the Sirens’ song. And while the new affection is given by God alone, the means he uses is routine exposure to truth, goodness, and beauty. These are transcendental and shaping virtues which, when accompanied by the work of God’s spirit, change us. No wax or lashes are necessary.

Let’s be honest: This is hard work. But it is good work. Shaping a child’s moral imagination is the best thing that teachers and parents can do for the next generation of worshippers, artists, creators, statesmen, homemakers, volunteers, and leaders.

This type of education pays attention to the songs, images, memes, stories, books, and movies of our world and doesn’t merely condemn them—it drowns them out with the true story of the whole world: God as creator and redeemer and restorer of everything that is true, good, and beautiful.