The Good Teacher is an Ambassador from the Transcendent World
by Joshua Gibbs
Students who spend their lives in the pressing, distracting excitement of the immanent world often find transcendence dull, confusing, and even false. But if you’ve only ever known fakes, reality will be disorienting. Here’s how to talk students through those first feelings of unease with the divine.
Student: Can we talk about Frankenstein?
Teacher: Sure.
Student: I think your interpretation of this book is really weird.
Teacher: What’s weird about it?
Student: You read really deeply into everything in the novel.
Teacher: Everything? Every line?
Student: Not every line. But it seems like you stop on every page, or every other page, and spend time “unpacking” something. Why does everything need some deeper meaning? Why can’t something happen that’s just part of the story?
Teacher: Can you give me an example of what you’re talking about?
Student: In the scene where Victor builds the monster, you kept harping on the fact that the monster doesn’t have a mother. So, the monster doesn’t have a mother—so what? You spent half an hour talking about the fact the monster doesn’t have a mother.
Teacher: I see. And what exactly did I say for half an hour?
Student: You talked about all the other characters in the novel who don’t have mothers.
Teacher: Which ones?
Student: Robert Walton doesn’t have a mother. Caroline Beaufort doesn’t have a mother. Then Victor’s mother dies young.
Teacher: Pretty much every significant character in the story. You don’t see a pattern?
Student: Maybe, but maybe not. How do we know it’s not a coincidence? Mary Shelley never came out and said that the lack of mothers in the novel meant something. It could be random. But you’re always picking things like that out of the books we read and pretending they mean something.
Teacher: Pretending?
Student: Sort of. You don’t know for certain that those details mean something.
Teacher: How could we better spend our time?
Student: By talking about what’s certain in the novel.
Teacher: We do that, though. In this case, we talked about all the characters in the novel that certainly don’t have mothers.
Student: But we don’t know for certain if that fact means something deep.
Teacher: So, how do we know which details in the novel matter and which ones don’t?
Student: We don’t. Look, I’m not expressing my objection very clearly. Let me try again. There may be a lot of characters in Frankenstein that don’t have mothers, but you spent half an hour talking about all the “broken families” in the novel, and then you said all this stuff about how none of the characters in the novel had a normal romantic relationship. Then you said that people who have weird romantic relationships—or weird sexual relationships—often created broken families, and then you talked about why. To hear you talk, this was the point of the novel. So, in the end, you were basically saying—and this is just my interpretation, sure—but you were basically saying, “Mary Shelley is a Republican and you should be a Republican, too,” and you got all of that from the fact that the monster doesn’t have a mother. It seems like a stretch.
Teacher: A stretch?
Student: Yes. A stretch.
Teacher: Then it doesn’t seem incorrect?
Student: I guess not, but it’s hard to take seriously.
Teacher: And what would you say, then, to the reader who didn’t find that interpretation hard to take seriously?
Student: I’d be like, “Really?”
Teacher: Ooh. Blistering retort.
Student: Very funny.
Teacher: If you’d like to make a case to the contrary, fine, but I don’t think have much of an argument. You’re asserting here...what exactly? That instead of collecting a number of similarities in the plot, seeing their shared meaning, tying that meaning to transcendent moral truths beyond the story, and presenting that moral truth as binding on readers...instead of doing all that, I should have done what? Nothing?
Student: No, not nothing. Your interpretation just seems like a stretch.
Teacher: You keep using the word “stretch” in a pejorative sense. Why?
Student: I don’t think the meaning of a book should be such a stretch.
Teacher: You believe “a thing” and “the meaning of a thing” ought to be closer together?
Student: Yes, that’s it.
Teacher: And if they’re far apart, that’s bad?
Student: Yes.
Teacher: Could you give me an example of a thing and its meaning being closer together?
Student: Sure. An ice cream shop that has a sign, and on the sign is an ice cream cone.
Teacher: What color should the ice cream on the cone be?
Student: I don’t know. Pink.
Teacher: Won’t people assume the shop only sells pink ice cream?
Student: What? No.
Teacher: Why not?
Student: Because no ice cream shop only sells pink ice cream.
Teacher: How do I know that? I haven’t been to all the ice cream shops in the world.
Student: But you have been to some ice cream shops, right?
Teacher: Yes.
Student: And did any of them only sell pink ice cream?
Teacher: No, but none of the ice cream shops I’ve been to had a sign which featured a pink ice cream cone.
Student: I think most people know that the pink ice cream cone on the sign is just a...
Teacher: A placeholder?
Student: Yes. The pink ice cream stands for every kind of ice cream.
Teacher: I see. Would it be surprising if this ice cream shop sold sorbet, too? Or can they only sell ice cream?
Student: Most ice cream shops sell sorbet. Plenty of them have cookies and brownies, as well.
Teacher: How do I know that?
Student: I don’t know. You just live in the world and see how things work.
Teacher: So, if the shop sign depicts a pink ice cream cone, I don’t have to buy pink ice cream from that shop. I can get other colors of ice cream. Can I get my ice cream in something other than a cone?
Student: Sure.
Teacher: So, even though the shop sign depicts a pink ice cream cone, I can get something from that shop that is neither pink, nor ice cream, nor served on a cone?
Student: Sure.
Teacher: Seems like quite the stretch.
Student: Not if you’ve been to a couple ice cream shops, it doesn’t. Not if you lived in the modern world for more than ten minutes.
Teacher: Exactly. There are some signs that can only be interpreted rightly after you’ve occupied the world of the sign for a little while. That’s why you don’t understand how to read Frankenstein.
Student: Thanks, but I’ve read plenty of books before.
Teacher: Sort of.
Student: What do you mean “sort of”? I’ve read hundreds of books.
Teacher: How many old books have you read?
Student: How old?
Teacher: More than two hundred years old.
Student: Not many. Just the ones I have to read for school.
Teacher: Don’t the classics you read for school seem a bit different than The Hunger Games or The Maze Runner?
Student: Different how?
Teacher: How many times have your read The Hunger Games?
Student: I’ve read the whole series three times.
Teacher: Would you say you needed three reads in order to really understand it?
Student: No. I like books that make sense on the first read.
Teacher: How much of The Hunger Games made sense on your first read?
Student: All of it.
Teacher: How much of Paradise Lost made sense to you when we read it in October?
Student: I mean, I understood the story.
Teacher: If I opened Paradise Lost to a random page in the middle and read ten lines, how many of those lines could you explain to a little child?
Student: I don’t like my odds. Maybe all of them, but maybe none.
Teacher: On average?
Student: I would bet around one-third of the book made sense to me.
Teacher: What would happen to that number if you read it a second time?
Student: It would go up.
Teacher: Paradise Lost is a book that hails from a different world than our own—a world where books were meant to be read many times in order to be truly understood. That’s also what a classic is—a book that needs to be read many times, a book with sufficient depth that it can sustain multiple readings. Classics are difficult books, which is why they have to be taught in schools. It’s difficult to understand them on your own. Our world—the contemporary world, I mean—is a place where most books are only written to be read once. They can be perfectly grasped in just a single read. There’s no deeper meaning to get at. Because modern people aren’t accustomed to reading books that have deeper levels of meaning, they’re not very good at discerning deeper levels of meaning in older books. The very idea of “deeper meaning” is treated with incredulity.
Student: Fine, but how do know the “deeper meaning” you’ve found is correct?
Teacher: I’ll come back to that question in a second. But first, let me ask you an apparently unrelated question. How much do you know about the Cold War?
Student: A little bit. I’ve seen a couple documentaries. I sort of got into the Cold War back when I first got into Stranger Things.
Teacher: Great. If you know anything about the Cold War, you know there was an arms race between the US and the USSR.
Student: Sure. Who will build the biggest weapon? And the bombs kept getting bigger.
Teacher: Right. Now, did you ever read The Butter Battle Book by Dr. Seuss?
Student: That’s the one about the people who butter their bread on the top going to war with people who butter their bread on the bottom, right?
Teacher: Right. And how does that war pan out?
Student: Well, it’s not a war with actual fighting or actual killing. It’s just a lot of threats.
Teacher: And each side keeps building bigger weapons—
Student: Until each side has a bomb that will destroy the other side.
Teacher: What makes you say that each side has a bomb?
Student: I remember the ending.
Teacher: But the book doesn’t say they have bombs. I think Seuss claims each side has a “Bitsy Big-boy Boomeroo.”
Student: Which is obviously a nuclear bomb.
Teacher: Obviously? And if someone said, “Look, if those things were bombs, Seuss would have called them bombs.”
Student: It’s a kid’s book.
Teacher: Did the average kindergartener understand what The Butter Battle Book was about when it debuted in 1984?
Student: No.
Teacher: It wouldn’t shock you to hear that pretty much every adult that read the book knew it was about the Cold War arms race, would it?
Student: No, it wouldn’t shock me.
Teacher: Suppose an adult read The Butter Battle Book back in 1984 and came away saying, “I don’t think this is about the Cold War at all. It’s just a fantasy story. All the characters have funny names. Yooks and Zooks. There’s nothing political here. They’re arguing about what side to butter bread on. It’s plain silliness, like all of Dr. Seuss’s books.”
Student: That would be quite naive.
Teacher: Agreed. Such an adult wouldn’t have a strong reading of the book.
Student: What exactly is a strong reading of a book?
Teacher: Well, I’m using the term a bit mock-heroically. I don’t actually think The Butter Battle Book is capable of sustaining a strong reading, at least not in the way I typically use that expression.
Student: You didn’t answer my question.
Teacher: True. When I refer to a “strong reading,” I mean a clearly articulated understanding of the spirit of a book. It’s a reader’s ability to delve below appearances and describe how all the disparate elements of a book coalesce into a singular moral vision. A strong reading is an interpretation of all the characters, arguments, images, and themes that brings the moral and spiritual weight of a book to bear on the audience. It is an act of deference to reality. It translates the substance of a text into the light by which we can view our own lives clearly.
Student: In other words, a strong reading explains the author’s purpose.
Teacher: No. A strong reading may reference the biography of the author, the historical era in which the author lived, and numerous facts or data points about the tradition in which the author worked—but the strong reading of a text sits well beyond all that. A strong reading isn’t fundamentally grounded in science, but in wisdom, charity, and gratitude for life itself. Weak writing cannot produce strong reading. A strong reading only emerges as a response to strong writing, but this is because a strong reader co-creates the meaning of a strong writer’s work. Very few of the books you’ve read can support a strong reading, which is why a strong reading seems strange to you.
Student: What do you mean “co-creates”?
Teacher: I mean that a book which goes uninterpreted isn’t really a book. It’s just an object, a doorstop. A reader plays a role in making a book a book. Likewise, a good reader is part of what makes a good book a good book.
Student: Prove it.
Teacher: Nah. Look, a little while ago, you suggested that anyone who had lived in the modern world “for more than ten minutes” would understand that a store which represented itself with a pink ice cream cone might sell many things that weren't pink ice cream cones. In other words, understanding the range of meanings suggested by a pink ice cream cone doesn’t come through linear rational proofs. It comes from living in the world that respects such a sign and learning “how they do things here.” Of course, some of the reasons a people “do things that way” can be reasonably explained, but some can’t. Your world—the world that primarily informs the way you think, feel, assign meaning; the world that dictates what you want, what you fear—is the modern world. The modern world isn’t the only world there is, though. There is another world and it is at play right now—it’s a world behind the modern world, beneath it, beyond it—and you might need to walk around in this world “for more than ten minutes” in order to understand how things work there. Frankenstein is an artifact from this other world, and the way I’m interpreting it for you is a skill born of this other world. Every day during class, I do my best to present this world to you—to create entrances into it, so you can spend a little time there and see “how they do things there.” But, it’s difficult.
Student: Why?
Teacher: Because it’s not a physical place and I can’t force you to go there. It’s an intellectual place, a spiritual place, and the only way to enter this place is to genuinely want to be there—and you have to want to be there before you fully understand what it is.
Student: I’ve never heard anyone say anything like this before.
Teacher: That’s because it’s a bit alarming to hear it stated in such terms, even though it’s the most accurate way of describing it.
Student: What is it? What is this other world? Does it have a name?
Teacher: Yes. Your world, the modern world, is the immanent world. The other world is the transcendent world.
Student: And what’s your relationship to the transcendent world?
Teacher: As a classical teacher, I’m an ambassador of the transcendent world. My job is to present the transcendent world to you in such a way that you’ll want to take up residence there, be naturalized, and become a subject.
Student: This is so weird. Your job is to give me knowledge. That’s what teachers do. They get the knowledge from their own heads into the heads of students.
Teacher: That is one of the things I do, but it’s arguably the least important thing I do. Be honest, though. You’ve been attending a classical school since you were in kindergarten. Have you never paid attention to the way classical education is described? Have you never read any of the documents or newsletters that this school sends out which describe what kind of thing a classical education is? In all of the assemblies you’ve been to, all of the informational meetings about senior trips and theses, you’ve never caught wind of the fact that a classical education isn’t about transferring data from one brain to the next?
Student: Are you talking about that whole “formation” thing?
Teacher: What’s the whole formation thing?
Student: This school is always talking about how it tries to form students.
Teacher: Form them for what?
Student: For...virtue? I also hear a lot about beauty.
Teacher: What do you hear about beauty?
Student: That it’s good.
Teacher: What kind of beautiful things do you hear about?
Student: In music appreciation class, we hear about the beauty of Bach’s music. We performed Mozart’s Requiem at the end of last year and heard about how beautiful it was the whole time we were learning it. But we also look at old paintings in art class—and in literature class, too, I suppose. And there’s the beauty of Paradise Lost and that sort of thing, which you’re always talking about.
Teacher: The sort of music and paintings and literature you’re given at this school isn’t like the sort of music and paintings and literature that’s popular these days, is it?
Student: Not really.
Teacher: How is it different?
Student: It’s harder to understand. It’s not...exciting. I don’t mean it’s bad, but it doesn’t appeal to me in the same way modern things do.
Teacher: But there’s something inside of you that "beautiful things” appeal to?
Student: I guess. But it’s not a strong appeal.
Teacher: Sure. Now tell me: have you met students who don’t have something inside that resonates with those beautiful things?
Student: Some students like them more than others.
Teacher: There are some students that despise them, though, aren’t there?
Student: They say they do.
Teacher: That thing inside you that resonates with beautiful things is from the transcendent world. Everyone is born with it. And if you don’t give yourself over to immanent things, that thing will grow and become strong, and deeply resonate with beautiful things. But if you abandon yourself to immanent things, that thing will grow so weak that it will become hard for you to hear it speak.
Student: Look, what is it inside of me that resonates with things from the transcendent world?
Teacher: It’s your soul. It’s the eternity that God wrote into your being—the eternity that longs for eternity. “Deep calls to deep,” as David says.
Student: That’s really weird.
Teacher: The transcendent world centers on beauty, wisdom, goodness, charity, and faith. It’s a higher, better world, and so it’s confusing and intimidating to citizens of the immanent world, which centers on pleasure and knowledge (but also progress, equality, and certainty). The transcendent world acknowledges different authorities than the immanent world. It is filled with different objects and different sounds, different theories and different ways of marking time. It is a world whose subjects often seek after different feelings than the feelings the modern world ceaselessly funnels you toward. The sounds of the immanent world are all around you, but you have a hard time hearing them. The spectacles of my world are in front of you, but you only see them dimly. On those occasions when you sense the presence of something from the transcendent world, you intuit the high cost of pursuing it further. You feel like a child of nine or ten whose friends have just begun moving on from toys, and you are sad because you have a lot of very fine toys, and you know that once your desire for adult things begins, your toys will mean less and less to you with every passing day.
Student: How did you become aware of this higher, better world?
Teacher: When I was young, my teachers tried to show it to me and, like yourself, I was quite incredulous. But the older I got, the more I came to see that not all of my teachers were subjects of this higher world. Only a few were. And I found that the teachers who lived in the transcendent world—or who aspired to live in in, at very least—tended to say things that stayed with me, things that meant more with the passage of time, not less. I felt compelled to go back to those teachers and to ask the same questions all over again, but to actually listen to their answers. I also decided that their lives were more compelling than the teachers who were content to live in the lower world. Everything my transcendent teachers said or did was touched by something elusive, something mysterious, but the world itself came to seem more elusive and mysterious than before. In the end, the teachers from the higher, better world were simply closer to reality than the teachers who kept saying, “Prove it.”
Student: You mean there are teachers who disagree with you about all this?
Teacher: Yes.
Student: At this school?
Teacher: Yes, of course. You already knew that, though.
Student: There are teachers at this school who agree with me?
Teacher: Yes.
Student: Who are they?
Teacher: They’re not teachers that students tend to have long conversations with after class. I suppose some teachers would also disagree with the way I’ve characterized things. They would say I’m presenting things from “a different worldview,” but it can't be reduced to a way of looking at things. It’s not a way of seeing things, it’s a way of communing with things. It’s a way of choosing which things are worthy of communion. It’s not a worldview. It’s a world. It’s a way of life. It’s life itself.
Student: I’m sure you know there are a lot of people out there who would tell you just how pretentious all of this sounds.
Teacher: Pretense is an accusation that citizens of the immanent world invariably level against subjects of the transcendent world, but it’s a charge that subjects level right back.
Student: You’re claiming you live in a higher, better world than I do, and you think I’m pretentious?
Teacher: No, I don’t think you’re pretentious. I don’t think you understand the lower world well enough to be pretentious. But I do think there’s something quite pretentious about people who are old enough to know better and still think that beauty is a matter of opinion, and that all opinions are equally valid—this is the great dogma of the immanent world. They’re claiming to live on the same level as martyrs, heroes, saints, and sages, even though they haven’t done anything noteworthy. Yes, I'm subject to a higher, better world—I’m a beggar in this world, but this transcendent world has given me something to yearn for—the life of God himself—and it has given me a straight and narrow path upon which to yearn for Him. It is not a path that is restricted to anyone, but you must truly desire to be on the path in order to be worthy of it.
