There are those who say Jane Austen is a superficial author concerning herself with scheming matchmakers, gossiping rich ladies and young women who are
interested in getting married at all costs. There are also those who see in Jane Austen a social commentary that is railing against the inequality of the social
classes of her period, and the mistreatment of women. I have to admit that I see neither of these things. What I see in Jane Austen is an author of remarkable perspicuity, one who is able to teach about virtue without preaching, and who shows her readers how virtue leads to happiness. She does so with humor and good grace.

Jane Austen teaches by example, and by moving the will of her audience to love the good. She is the opposite of someone like Dumas, who, with similar gifts, moves his audience to admire and applaud evil. In the Three Musketeers, for example, one finds oneself rooting for the hero, D’Artagnan , as he is dallying with a married woman. That does not happen in Jane Austen.

Jane Austen also has a peculiar gift. She is able to use humor, irony and even ridiculous characters without ever lessening the force of her teaching. In fact, her ironic commentary makes the serious characters more real, and her ridiculous characters not only provide comic relief, they also highlight by contrast the serious message being proposed.

We who are homeschooling our children do so because we care about a particular kind of formation, both intellectual and moral, that we want to attain for ourselves and pass on to our children and students. We are particularly interested in the formation provided by classical education. One may define such an education in various ways, some more specific and some more general, but for our purpose here the following general description of the goals of classical education is proposed. “Classical Education is the cultivation of wisdom and virtue by nourishing the soul on truth, goodness and beauty, so that, in Christ, the
student is better able to know, glorify and enjoy God.”

In that definition one sees more than intellectual formation, for one clearly hopes to move the heart as well as the mind. Both intellect and will must be rightly ordered. To understand this proper ordination, one needs some background. The order of the creature to his Creator is the fundamental order. We are ordered to God, He is not ordered to us. He is in authority over us, and we are to obey Him. This is for our good, not for His, a very important point I see more clearly as I get older.

Every rule God gives us to obey is a rule that is ordered to making us happy. We are like car owners. The manufacturer of the car gives us a book to read about how to make the car run well. We can read that book and follow the instructions, or we can throw away the book and experiment. In the end we may get it right, either way, but the second way is apt to result in some mistakes, even major mistakes. We might put the oil in the gas line, or never service the engine. The car just won’t run as well under those circumstances. The same thing is true of God’s rules. They are given to us to help us live happily, and part of that is to have the right order between us and our Creator. As a race we were created in that right order.

This right order was upset at the beginning when Adam disobeyed God. Disaster was the immediate result. First, Adam’s sin changed the nature of our friendship with God. We no longer walked and talked with Him in the garden. (I’d like to mention here that in its own peculiar way this is a comforting thought. In the last 25 years I have seen some sad situations in families. There have been moms and dads who tried very hard to raise their children well, who did all the right things, who sacrificed for their children, who homeschooled their children, or sent them to the best available schools, at considerable financial sacrifice, who lived a sacramental life in their homes, and their children still made mistakes, sometimes serious mistakes. Those parents should realize that it is not necessarily their fault, something they did wrong. Adam and Eve had the best possible situation. They walked and talked with God in the garden of Paradise. Yet they chose badly. Free will is a gift, but it means that there is the potential for bad choices.) For Adam and Eve the result of the Fall was that they, and through them we, had to leave the garden. Our ordering to God was changed, for we lost our original justice.

Jane Austen was well aware of this and of its consequences. Characters such as Willoughby in Sense and Sensibility, and Lydia in Pride and Prejudice, reveal
the natural result of this lack of order.

Now, justice is obtained when each has its due. Original justice is the term by which we designate the right ordering of the creature to the Creator. When that was lost, the internal order among the parts of our nature was damaged. Before, each part of the person had what it was supposed to have in terms of control. There was a proper subordination among the parts of our nature. Before the Fall, the concupiscible and irascible appetites, namely the appetites in us that are moved to desire, love, hope, fear and anger, and the will, whereby we choose, were subordinated to the intellect. When the intellect presented something as a good, the will and appetites would move to it, and when the intellect presented something as bad, the will and appetites would move away from it. As a result of the Fall, we have lost that order, and sin is the consequence. Now we have to work to regain that ordering; we have to work to achieve the moral virtues. Jane Austen sees that
clearly, and she gives us examples of those who have worked and those who haven’t, those who succeeded and those who failed, to achieve virtue. In fact, that is her whole point.

In the definition of classical education given above it is clear that part of our goal as teachers is to cultivate virtue. We want to help our students achieve the moral virtues.

The question is how, for teaching the moral virtues is harder than teaching the intellectual virtues. We all know how to teach intellectual virtues or habits of thought; it is what we do each day in our school work with our children. But the question of how to teach the moral virtues has occupied man as long as there have been men to think about it. The first question of Plato’s Meno is this. Meno asks, “Can you tell me Socrates – is virtue something that can be taught? Or does it come by practice? Or is it neither teaching nor practice that gives it to a man but natural aptitude or something else?” The reason the question arises is because we all have the experience of knowing that something is good and worth doing, and yet not doing it, or knowing that something is bad and shouldn’t be done, and still doing it. In this matter knowing is clearly not enough.

Meno raises the question, and much of that dialogue is devoted to making the distinctions one needs to answer it. But Plato addresses the question in many other places as well, the Republic for example. He tells us that if the soul has in it good, true, beautiful, noble, and heroic images, it will become like those things. Further, he says that since whatever is true is also beautiful, an appreciation of the beautiful prepares the way for an appreciation of the true. If children love the beautiful they will love the truth, as truth, when they are older.

Thus, even in terms of intellectual formation, fostering the fine arts is important. A love of the beautiful and true, and a corresponding distaste for what is ugly and false, can help children order their souls. One way we do this is to give the students high and noble objects at every stage of formation. We can give them heroic examples in the lives of those around us, in the saints, and in great literature. There is a reason for the fact that loving the beautiful and hating the ugly prepares one to love the truth as truth. This reason is that the good, the true, and the beautiful are all aspects of one and the same reality. If something is good, it is beautiful, for it will necessarily have the qualities that make something beautiful. Similarly, if something is true, it is beautiful, for it will have all the qualities that make something beautiful.

So our curricula need to include objects of beauty to move the heart, as well as clear truths to move the mind. Great literature, such as the novels of Jane Austen, does this; it moves the heart and prepares the mind for the truth. Aristotle defines the fine arts-poetry, music, and painting, for example – as modes of imitation.

He attributes the origin of such arts to two causes: (1) man is the most imitative of all animals, and learns first from imitation, and (2) man naturally delights in imitation, since it involves a sort of immediate learning, “Gathering the meaning of things.” But because this delight is so accessible and unaccompanied by pain, it is easy to regard it as an end in itself, not ordered to any further or higher end. This would be wrong. Although the delight we experience in such imitations may be justified as an occasional, necessary rest from the labors of life, so that reading authors such as Jane Austen is fun, and a restoration of spirit, such is not the greatest benefit to be gained from them. In speaking of the fine arts, St. Thomas Aquinas says that their noblest purpose is to lead one to virtue through a suitable representation (“inducere ad virtutem per decentem representationem”).

Now, of course, one becomes virtuous by doing virtuous acts; for example, one becomes temperate by refraining from too much food, or by eating as much as one should even if not interested, in other words, by acting temperately. But most of us have to be led to such actions. Good example and instruction can lead one to virtue, as can suitable punishment for wrongdoing. One can experience these directly, or one can experience them indirectly, through literature. Such measures will not cause virtue, in and of themselves, but they can dispose one to virtue. Suitable representations in the fine arts, especially in literature, also produce a disposition to virtue.

It seems that imitation is natural to man because of his composite nature. Composed of body and soul, he participates in both the material and the spiritual. His intellectual knowledge arises from sensation, and continues to depend upon it. He must learn what he knows, little by little, knowing things in a sort of confusion before he knows them distinctly. The things that are harder for him to know –things more distant from the immediately sensible –must often be grasped in a likeness before they can be grasped in themselves. [Our Lord’s frequent use of parables illustrates this need.] This necessity for likenesses is especially great in the young.

Not only are they somewhat immersed in the immediately sensible and imaginable, they also lack the breadth of experience required for right judgment. (That is why obedience is so important for the young. By obedience they participate in the prudence of those who have experience, namely their parents and teachers. On their own they do not have the experience necessary for right judgment.)

Aristotle himself says that youngsters are not apt listeners to ethical discourses, for they lack experience of the actions that occur in life, and ethical discussions start from these and are about these. Now, although the fine arts are all modes of imitation, they differ among themselves in three ways: in the object imitated, the means employed, and in the manner. With music, for example, the object is the passions of the soul, and the means are rhythm and melody, either voiced or sounded on an instrument. With painting, the object is the look of things, and the means are form and color. But the noblest of the arts are those that employ words, the signs and instruments of the human understanding. Here the object of imitation is comprehensive: action, thought and character.

One may imitate one or another of these objects separately from the others, as in a Shakespearean sonnet, where thought is the object. In plays and stories, however, all three objects are brought together, though the action is principal. The manner of these plays and stories may be either narrative or dramatic. I want to talk about the narrative, which is what Jane Austen provides, and which is especially suited to all three objects of imitation together.

In the reading of a good story, there is the delight in recognizing and learning that is common effect of all the artistic imitations. We enjoy, are delighted by, the representations of reality we see in paintings, or hear in symphonies. But there are also, especially for the young, further effects, both pleasant and profitable. The experience of the reader is extended and enriched, vicariously, without the painful and destructive consequences that often come with lived experience. Also, from the way in which the objects are represented, the reader can be led to regard them in a true light. The imitator has an advantage over nature here. He can bring out and make evident what, in the nature of things, is inward and hidden; he can make things look like what they are. The heroine of the story can be beautiful and kind, and the hero both brave and handsome. Their external appearance and actions match their internal character. To be sure, this does not give knowledge, but only right estimation. But this follows the natural order in the formation of mind and character. Just as disposition comes before habit, so does discovery come before judgment. Good literature gives the student experience, and shows him in an incarnational way, what virtue is and what it looks like. Jane Austen is an expert in this endeavor.

There have seldom, if ever, been narratives as delightful to read as the novels of Jane Austen. Each of the five principal novels – Pride and Prejudice, Sense and Sensibility, Persuasion, Mansfield Park and Emma – is completed with the marriage of its female protagonist, and the sequence of actions within the story is unified by that action. This might seem small, if considered in isolation from what is entailed in such a situation, or when compared to War and Peace and other such grand novels. Jane Austen herself insisted on the limited scope of her story-telling. But it is my view that the actions and decisions leading to marriage are critical in the lives of most people, and have a great bearing on happiness. In a story about such a situation, there are many occasions for revelation of character, and the consequences of character in action, as well as of the complications arising from misunderstandings and bad luck.

Many of these are amusing. Jane Austen takes good advantage of these opportunities. But what raises her work above almost all others is not her exceptional skill
as an imitator of her chosen subject, though she has such exceptional skill, but the firm and clear moral outlook that underlies her manner of representing action and character. Not preaching to the reader – for this is not the way of the storyteller – she lets the story itself make the argument, so deftly that one receives the
conclusion without being explicitly aware that he has done so.

In the next article, I will talk more specifically about how Jane Austen moves us to virtue through her stories.

Stay tuned for part 2*