Commonplaces--April 2022

“Duties and studies and exertions are painful; for these too are necessarily compulsions unless they become habitual, then habit makes them pleasurable.”—Aristotle, Rhetoric I.11 (1370a)

“A man may wrong his enemies, because that is pleasant; he may equally wrong his friends, because that is easy.”—Aristotle, Rhetoric I.12

“How can I express in word the depravity of the human heart? For it is inevitable that the creature which the love of God has not permeated should love itself the most.”—Philip Melanchthon, Loci Communes

“Justice—n. A commodity which in a more or less adulterated condition the State sells to the citizen as a reward for his allegiance, taxes, and personal service.”—Ambrose Bierce, The Devil’s Dictionary

“Incompatibility—n. In matrimony a similarity of tastes, particularly the taste for domination.”—Ambrose Bierce, The Devil’s Dictionary

“No wretched drunkard reeling along the road is a more pitiable or disgusting sight than the man who is intoxicated into idiocy with the alcohol of his own accursed pride.”—Archibald G. Brown, Sermons Preached at Stepney Green Tabernacle, quoted in Mark Jones Knowing Sin

“The goodness of God makes the devil a polisher, while he intends to be a destroyer.”—Stephen Charnock, in Mark Jones, Knowing Sin

“[The young] think leanness means health and weakness good judgement, and while they think it is enough to be without fault, they fall into the fault of being without virtues.”—Quintilian, Institutio Oratoria II.4

“In any conflict, the better resourced (even if he is the victim) is thought to be the aggressor, because of his greater power.”—Quintilian, VIII.5

“Eloquence is really nothing else than the power of giving a distinctive look to all, or at any rate most, of our thoughts.—Quintilian, IX.1

“Such composing lacks clarity because of the verbiage, for when a speaker throws more words at someone who already understands, he destroys the clarity by the darkness.”—Aristotle, Rhetoric III.3

“The worst thing about ignorance is that it believes every advisor has a true answer.”—Quintilian, XII.3

“They took their seats for a time in the philosophers’ lecture halls, so that later on, dour in public and dissolute at home, they could claim authority by despising everybody else. Philosophy can be counterfeited, eloquence cannot.”—Quintilian, XII.3

“Even shyness—a vice, but an amiable one, and one that can easily produce virtues—is sometimes damaging, and has in many cases caused gifts of talent and learning never to come to light, but to moulder away in secret.”—Quintilian, XII.5

“People who cannot be led into better ways by reason can only be restrained by fear.”—Quintilian, XII.7

“Excellence is always something that had not been there before.”—Quintilian, XII.11 

“Something that comes close to the truth is not yet completely identical with the truth itself. The Muslim stands much closer to the truth than the servant of Baal or Molech, and yet Muhammad stood infinitely far from the truth.”—Abraham Kuyper, Common Grace Vol. I

A Crumb of Chreia

[A chreia is an ancient Greek rhetorical exercise, in which a student was required to expand on a well-known saying or action of a famous person by using certain methods or "headings." This one was composed for a rhetoric course final.]

Quintilian wrote that “Everybody prefers to have learned rather then to learn!” (Institutio Oratoria III.1)
This is a trustworthy saying, for Quintilian was not only a practitioner of rhetoric, but one of its great teachers; his entire work is dedicated to nothing else than the instruction and formation of a perfect orator. That is too immense a topic to praise here, but surely we can honor him for this bare bit of insight, spilled out(almost carelessly) from the great storehouse of his wisdom.
For he is saying that what students have already mastered is very hard to replace with later instruction, even if what they have learned originally is faulty or incomplete. The cause of this is not difficult to determine, since it lives in every man’s experience.
Who does not remember agonizing over some approaching final exam in his school days, knowing that mountains of effort and rivers of sweat had been used up in trying to anchor the needed facts in the memory? Every student knows that learning is tough, and often tedious. The raw clay of the mind is being pressed into a different mold; when it finally emerges bright, shining, and ready to be displayed to others, there is a genuine pride in the achievement.
But then another rushes up, secure in his own superior learning, and attacks the hard-won treasure with words of scorn! “They were poorly instructed, they were wrongly taught, they should instead listen to a newcomer and begin again.” Even if the newcomer is right and everything he says is as true as the face of God, the one being instructed instantly revolts. Admitting this new point means that all previous effort has been vain. Not only this, but it means he must own up to being wrong—worse, being a deceived fool in the presence of someone who knew even more about a subject. Pride, embarrassment, and anger combine to stifle the humility of confessing error.
On the contrary, a man who can be convinced of his own faults is rare—he has disciplined his wayward emotions and is prepared to do whatever needs to be done to arrive, not at mere knowledge, but at truth. What teacher would not travel many miles to find such a student? The very rarity of those who prefer to learn contributes to their worth, compared to those who prefer to have learned.
This saying proves that labor is hard and men are proud, and that once they have mined a bit of knowledge for themselves they are reluctant to throw it away, even if it is proved that what they clutch is nothing more than fool’s gold.
Consider with what reluctance Quintilian admits in a few places that he had changed some positions on pedagogy since his younger days! Here the one doing the correcting is not even another, but his own older, wiser self—the one person every human being on the earth will proclaim incontestably superior to who he used to be. And yet he is reluctant to admit even an improvement in his system before the sharp eyes of others, and defends his change of course with many reasons and proofs; afraid of appearing weak and inconstant as the wind.
Therefore, as Solomon has written, Wisdom calls to her children: “Hear instruction, and be wise, and refuse it not.” He joins his testimony to the orator’s: refusal to learn is not the path of the wise few. It is instead the path of the mulish multitude—but the pride of the foolish blinds them to which road they are traveling, leaving them in the dark even while they claim sight.
With all this in mind, it is quite clear that Quintilian has given us a great and memorable saying of education. May we always keep it as something we are learning rather than have learned.