SS #137 – Fairy Tales Are True (with Vigen Guroian!!)
Today we have with us our very special guest Vigen Guroian. We will be discussing his book Tending the Heart of Virtue. Now there is a second edition out.
In honor of this new edition, we are so excited to share this interview with you.
[28:11] Is truth only found in precepts & propositions?
[35:15] Disney, classic and now
[36:35] Seeking true education
[41:53] Magic is an analogue of Grace
[43:37] Fairy tales aren’t just for children
[47:26] The genius of the Grimms and others like them
[51:56] Modern adaptions of fairy tales
[52:36] Disney, good and bad, again
[57:09] We must read real fairy tales & love them
[1:06:53] Education needs more stories
Today’s Hosts and Source
Brandy Vencel continued her love of reading by reading aloud to her kids.
Abby Wahl expanded her love of stories by reading them aloud with her kids.
Special Guest: Vigen Guroian
“If you deprive children of stories, you seriously injure them.”
Vigen Guroian
Until his retirement in 2015, Dr. Guroian was Professor of Religious Studies in Orthodox Christianity at the University of Virginia. He is now a Permanent Senior Fellow of the Russell Kirk Center for Cultural Renewal, Senior Fellow at the Center on Law and Religion at Emory University, Distinguished Fellow of the John Jay Institute, and Senior Fellow at the Trinity Forum. He also is on the faculty of Memoria College online. Most importantly for our purposes, he is the author of a book we love and highly recommend: Tending the Heart of Virtue: How Classic Stories Awaken a Child’s Moral Imagination.
Scholé Everyday: What We’re Reading
Brothers Karamazov, Dostevesky
Vigen Guroian has read Brothers Karamazov 30-40 times in his life!
The Bright Valley of Love, Edna Hong
Abby is reading this biography with her teenage sons.
Pax: War & Peace in Rome’s Golden Age, Tom Holland
Brandy enjoys Roman history. It probably has something to do with teaching Plutarch so many years.
Why a new edition of Tending the Heart of Virtue?
Having been asked to write a sequel, Vigen Guroian and his editor decided rather to create a second, expanded edition of Tending the Heart of Virtue. It’s 150% the size with 3 new chapters.
It’s been 25 years since the first edition, and so it’s better that the next generation of parents and teachers read Tending the Heart of Virtue rather than only a sequel.
Fairy Tales added to the new edition
Besides the Ugly Duckling and Grimm’s version of Cinderella, Guroian includes King of the Golden River by Ruskin and The Wise Woman by George Macdonald.
These stories teach us how goodness truly relates to happiness or how obedience leads to perfection or how we can become real human beings.
Truth is more than propositional
Stories can not be reduced to propositions because then it takes the whole experience out of the story, and the meaning of not only the story, but life.
The choices we make in life are affected more by our imagination than our reason, so we must have a moral imagination formed by stories.
The narrative is not the shell, covering truth. Rather, it is the truth conveyed. There is no method to read a story and get the meaning out of it. There’s just learning from the story itself, as a whole.
Reason is the natural organ of truth; but imagination is the organ of meaning. Imagination, producing new metaphors or revivifying old, is not the cause of truth, but its condition.
C.S. Lewis
What is education? A value, a goal, or a character?
Start by trying to appreciate the stories for what they are, not for what values you can
Values are like smoke rings. At first they look like circles, but they quickly dissipate. We should be interested in Virtue, not values.
“Education is education of character or it’s nothing. And you’re not going to educate character by presenting children with precepts. They can use precepts in all sorts of ways. If you don’t have the right character, they can use it to lie. They can use those precepts to lie just as much as to tell the truth. So it’s character, that’s what education is.”
Vigen Guroian
It’s not that our current culture doesn’t have imagination. It’s that it has a rotten on, full of bad stories. We must awaken the moral imagination of our children and ourselves with fairy tales.
Classical education needs more than Bible + Greco-Roman
Scripture, myths, and fairy tales – there is a wisdom in all three that belongs to humanity that we must know and reclaim.
Knowing how to read fairy tales will help us read Scripture between the lines, as proper genres and not merely laid out propositions.
Mentioned in the Episode
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