Following fear of God, which is the first of Augustine’s “Steps to Wisdom,” is what Augustine calls piety. He says that once we recognize that God is in authority over us and we start to learn his commandments, we ought to realize that “whatever is…written [in Scripture], even though it be hidden, is better and truer that anything we could devise by our own wisdom.”
Just today, my 8th grade class read a similar idea in “Sic et Non,” a work by medieval scholar Peter Abelard, who cautions that when scripture, or even the writings of the church fathers or another credible, time-tested text is difficult to understand, we should “believe that we lack felicity in understanding rather than that they lack felicity in writing.” In other words, even if we don’t quite understand something, we love it because of the source—we persevere, trusting that the Great Books are worthwhile endeavors, and that scripture will always ring true eventually, when we have the ears to hear it.
This is what Augustine, elsewhere, calls ordo amoris, which is Latin for “the order of love.” When our loves are rightly ordered, we love all of creation because God created it, and we love God above all because we rightly fear him and are piously devoted to him.
And students don’t have to be able to tackle Medieval texts to start to develop rightly ordered loves. In fact, one of the best tools for ordering one’s loves is memorization, the main learning tool of the grammar stage. Children’s loves are naturally ordered towards the acts of repetition and routine. And eventually, the material being memorized, rather than the act of memorization itself, becomes the object of affection. We naturally feel affection for the things that are a part of us, and that includes what we’ve engraved onto our hearts and our minds through memorization.
There’s an adage oft-repeated in classical education that says, “you become what you behold.” When we have our students memorize something, it’s because it is something true, or good, or beautiful, and we want our students to behold those things so often that they become a deeply ingrained part of their rightly ordered affections.
Aubry Myers is the Director of Classical Education at Granite Classical Tutorials.
