Articles From The Classical Teacher

     There are several directions you can go in teaching Latin.  In the articles on our web site, we have extolled the virtues of Christian Latin as opposed to the strictly classical.  If you have read the Dorothy Sayers article in particular, you will have heard that Christian Latin is easier, which is true.  Since I teach logic also, I was interested in a way to integrate these two trivium subjects.  Well, I am here to report that I have found what I was looking for--and more. 

     I have a class this year which has a mix of third year and fifth year Latin students.  The third year Latin students have completed Henle: First Year (a book that really takes about two years to complete); the fifth year students have completed Henle: First and Second Year.  I decided this year to focus on Christian Latin.  So we used a book called Latin Grammar, by Scanlon and Scanlon.  The grammar in this book was not well presented (my students had already covered it anyway), but it covered quite a bit of Christian Latin vocabulary.  They could therefore focus on learning the vocabulary using grammar concepts they already knew.  Since the book contains about ten chapter readings in the Latin Vulgate, it was a good introduction to Christian Latin.

     After completing the 20 chapters in about 10 weeks, we began the second Scanlon and Scanlon book, Second Latin, covering about a chapter a week.  The Second Latin book has more chapters, and they tend to be shorter and easier, on the whole, than those in the first book. In conjunction with this (and here's where it gets interesting), we have begun to translate St. Thomas Aquinas' Summa Theologia.  The Summa, for those who don't know, is one of the two or three great Christian works of Church history, up there with St. Augustine's City of God.

     There were several things that made the Summa attractive as a beginning Christian Latin text.  First, although many people have the misperception that the Summa is something to be read by advanced students of theology, it is, in fact, a book written for beginners.  Second, its language is simple and straightforward: Thomas strove to present as clear and concise a presentation of Christian thought as the language would allow; he succeeded.  Third, Thomas writes his arguments in so straightforward a fashion as to make the students work of picking out the logical syllogisms relatively easy.  And finally, the content of the book gave me the opportunity, not only to integrate Latin and logic, but instruction in religion as well. With very few exceptions, there is little in Thomas with which Catholics and Protestants would disagree.

     Here's what I do:
     The Summa is divided into three parts, each of which has a little over 100 questions (chapters, if you will).  Each of these questions has several articles.  Along with the one chapter in the second Scanlon and Scanlon book (which is designed to prepare students to read works of Christian philosophy--a perfect fit), we translate one article a week.  An article is about one single-spaced typed page in length.  Thomas writes in the classic medieval style: he presents one or more objections to some Christian belief, states the simple case for the Christian position, then defends the Christian position in one main response, followed by a specific refutation of each of the objections.  Each one of these sections usually contains one logical syllogism (sometimes two or three).  The students are responsible for translating from the Latin, then stating Thomas' syllogisms in proper logical form.  Since they have all taken my Traditional Logic course, they all know the method used to identify a syllogism with its proper Latin title (contained in Traditional Logic, Book II).  We also discuss the ideas Thomas presents in the text.
     Latin, logic, and Christian theology--all in one course.

     After we completed the first question, I asked them to reflect on what they were now able to do: to take an original Latin work, translate it, and give the name of each argument used in it.  These 10th and 11th graders are doing something only a handful of college students would even be able to attempt, let alone succeed at.

     Most of the parents of my students are wanting them to go on to a more "practical" language, like Spanish or French--but the students want more Latin!  These students now have a sense of achievement that they will carry with them into whatever subject they study.