Humane Letters: History, Literature, Theology and Natural History
In 1802 William Wordsworth looked around him at the state of his nation and cried out “
Milton
, thou shouldst be living at this hour:/England hath need of thee.” He
contended that his native land had “forfeited their ancient English
dower/Of inward happiness. We are selfish men;” he continued, “O raise
us up, return to us again/And give us manners, virtue, freedom, and
power!”
Two hundred years later his words still sound the dilemma of
our age. As an academy of the liberal
arts, New Albion firmly believes that a truly liberal education,
culminating in the close reading of the great literature which is our
heritage, is the business of every student.
The
Humane Letters are so called because their work is to make us
human—humane, virtuous, reasonable, considerate—to call to life
thinking men. Is a man more of a man who has read The Iliad?
Our forefathers would have answered with an incredulous “yes,”
wondering why one would need even to ask such a question. How can one
read and understand the great authors of our own language—Shakespeare,
Milton, Dickens, or even T.S. Eliot—who has not read their Greek
progenitors? How does one learn what it means to be virtuous, heroic,
or noble who has not wrestled with Achilles and Agamemnon?
At
New
Albion
Academy
we affirm our forbears and contend that the influence of tales about
heroes like Hector, told in the exquisite poetry of an author like
Homer, whose progeny is found in nearly all of Western literature
written since, is ennobling, humbling, thought-provoking and
grace-giving. The Humane Letters tell us who we are and who we ought to
be. They show us where we fall short of our ideals and call us up to
higher ground. They point us to God and fill us with a sense of proper
awe at His works and grace.
The
Humane Letters at New Albion are comprised of the disciplines of
History, Literature, Theology and Natural History and while each
discipline has its discreet skills and body of knowledge, none can be
viewed accurately apart from its presence in the Humane Letters as a
whole. There is a great deal of overlap in the study of these four
disciplines, such that to determine when one has stopped studying
history and started studying literature, for example, can be difficult.
While acknowledging the importance of the unique elements and learning
opportunities of the individual disciplines,
New
Albion
Academy
seeks to teach them as part of an integrated whole.
The
writing of history is perhaps the most natural behavior of human
beings. Our impulse to record who we are, where we have come from, and
what we have done is intrinsic to the race. One of the important
features of history which has been lost as it has suffered the
alteration to a “subject” for study and consequently been reduced to a
sort of scientific examination of events, dates, names, theories, and
“movements,” is that history is a story. As Christians we know that all
of history is the tale of redemption—the working out in time and space
of the salvation of God’s elect. For this reason, while the
memorization of kings and queens, battles and decrees, numbers and
dates is given its proper place in the history curriculum at New Albion
Academy, history is always taught with an appropriate emphasis on the
real-life drama—plot, climax, dénouement, theme—that it truly is.
Similarly,
literature is inescapably historical. Often our best means of
comprehending history, the literature of a given era tells us much
about what its people valued. Rather than simply being told about the
manners and customs, attitudes and expressions of a people in their
literature, we experience them. In addition, the great thoughts that
men have thought, the great questions they have asked and answered,
what Mortimer Adler called “the great conversation,” reside in the
writings of Western literature. Names which populate the booklist for
literature at New Albion include ancient Greeks and Romans, such as
Homer, Sophocles, Ovid, and Virgil; Medieval and Renaissance authors, such as Chaucer, Dante, Shakespeare, Spenser, and Donne; and later
writers, such as Austen, Wordsworth, Dickens, Tennyson, George Eliot,
Twain, Poe, T.S. Eliot, and C.S. Lewis.
The
importance of this list is not that it includes so many names, but that
the reading and study of these authors which students of New Albion
Academy undertake introduces them to that great conversation about what
it means to be human, how the soul relates to God, and invites them to
participate in this centuries-long process of investigation and
inquiry. They will learn not simply to read an author and express what
the story “meant to them,” but to think the author’s thoughts after
him, that is to understand the author’s intent and to wrestle with the
questions he asks on his own terms, dealing with those thoughts in
light of others he has read. | 
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