When we say that an essay we’ve read or a speech we’ve heard was edifying, what do we mean? To be edified refers to the idea of being improved by something morally. We’re not edified in reading a car repair manual or hearing a technical explanation of how electricity works, but we are when an author or speaker has managed to touch upon certain notions fundamental to our humanity and in doing so has moved us—not only emotionally but so deeply that we feel the better for it because we realize we have been enlightened to some degree. We understand ourselves a measure more.
A phrase like moral improvement is now, we must admit, hopelessly antiquated, in part because we’ve lost the original meaning of the adjective moral, which had to do at first with the entire tendency, or facing direction, of one’s character, not one’s religious inclinations alone. And if edification has something to do with morality in this wider sense, then it will only complicate our question to learn that the word edify has the strangest of origins. It derives from the Latin noun for a building, a linguistic lineage we can still see in our word edifice. So what in the world could be the connection between edification and an edifice, and what might any of that have to do with language and the liberal arts?
We might be able to see a connection between the deeper self-awareness we call edification and the physical structure we call an edifice with the help of the noun improvement in that obsoleted phrase moral improvement, for we do speak of improving both an architectural structure and one’s character. When we apply the same word (whether noun or verb) to two such very different realities, it is likely we see something common between them. Both of these, after all, are things we build, and perhaps they are both structures which can be built in a way that makes possible a certain life within them—the one material and the other intellectual. Both in their own way are properly human.
It may be, moreover, that when we speak of being edified by words whether written or spoken—or indeed by some deliberate, uplifting behavior we witness—we are sensing ourselves affected by the kind of life which had developed under the shelter of a well-constructed character, a life whose intentions and actions have arisen within the space that an intellectual edifice had made possible. Perhaps that, then, suggests a connection between edification and language and the liberal arts: that in our intellectual life, we do not so much as make a living or life for ourselves, as we build the structure, the edifice, in which that life can protectively take root.
And there is more insight to be had on this in the fact that an edifice originally in Latin denoted a temple (aedes), an appointed, not furnished, building, a work of human construction wherein dwelled realities not human. A temple, like the human mind, was a place to attend to, not an enclosure to live within. It was the open but guarded space of the temple, as of any large building or home, which was its essential element. The ability and the freedom to come and go from a temple or from a home or from one’s own thoughts is wherein its value lies. This is the higher meaning behind naming the liberal arts liberal—because those are the studies which can make one’s own highest freedom possible. What liberal studies bring about is precisely what is absent when we cannot find serious persons to protect a vision and lead a people.
I came across recently an old guide to books and reading which quotes a former president of Harvard as saying that fifteen minutes a day with good literature will accrue the basics of a liberal education. Curiously, an old college professor of mine, a deeply cultured teacher of steady, quiet, intelligent mien, used to say the same. The study of the liberal arts, which at its foundation is the study of language, can build such a lodging for us—at once an edifice, an edification, and a serious education.
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Upcoming Short Course
Beginning Monday evening, February 9, from 6:00 to 7:00 CT, Writing Smartly will offer again its four-week online short course entitled Reading Closely to Write. Each week we will examine the structure and stylistic design of sentences from one short story (each averaging about 15 pages) written by a celebrated author.
We will analyze the grammar and composition of certain significant sentences from each story, and consider how other designs the author could have chosen would have produced different effects. Our emphasis will be on the grammar and language of the reading so that we can begin to develop an eye and ear for discovering our own natural written voice. By considering linguistic forms closely like this, we can come to appreciate the craft of language, training ourselves to discern assumptions and question implications—all to become more thoughtful about what we read and hear.
New selections this term will be from Short Story Masterpieces, edited by Robert Penn Warren and Albert Erskine (Dell Publishing, 1982), readily available at Amazon and elsewhere. Tuition for this four-session online short course is $350, paid through Zelle (ultimo@writingsmartly.com), or by personal check (please email me for the mailing address). Tuition this term will include one optional 45-minute session of private instruction where you may discuss your own writing, or learn more about the points of grammar and style we discussed in the course. Upon your registration, I will reply with a confirmation and the Zoom link for the course.
I hope you can join us as we all await the spring.
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