The After Dinner Scholar

”Nativity” by John Donne with Dr. Glenn Arbery

After a month of “The Christmas Season” which was actually Advent, it’s finally the Christmas Season allowing us the leisure to reflect on the Nativity of Christ.

Poet, novelist, and Wyoming Catholic College president, Dr. Glenn Arbery helps us reflect on the birth of Christ using the poem "Nativity" by John Donne.

Christmas Poems with Izzy Ecoff, Gregory Bowman, Catherine Stancliffe, Elizabeth Shepherd, and Jonathan Alllen

Clement Clarke Moore’s “A Visit from St. Nicholas” may be the best-known poem in America today. For many it may be the only-known poem besides lyrics to one pop song or another. We are not a poetic people though that was not always true. Americans in the past had a huge appetite for poetry—an appetite we can recover.

Of course, Moore’s paean to St. Nick is hardly the only Christmas poetry in the world. Christians have been writing poems about the First Coming of Christ as a babe in Bethlehem for two thousand years.

As a Christmas gift to you, our listeners, on this podcast Wyoming Catholic College students share from that treasury of Christmas poetry.

Caesar, Virgil, and The Aeneid with Dr. Pavlos Papadopoulos

When Aeneas visits the underworld in Virgil's Aeneid, he sees great heroes who have died and great heroes yet to be born.

Here is Caesar, and all the offspring

of Julus destined to live under the pole of heaven.

This is the man, this is him, whom you so often hear

promised you, Augustus Caesar, son of the Deified,

who will make a Golden Age again in the fields

where Saturn once reigned, and extend the empire beyond

the Libyans and the Indians....”

It’s no surprise that Virgil wrote such extravagant praise of Caesar Augustus into his epic. After all, Caesar Augustus gave him the job of creating the founding myth of the Roman Empire that had supplanted the Roman Republic.

As he has been teaching The Aeneid to our Wyoming Catholic College sophomores, Dr. Pavlos Papadopoulos has been thinking a great deal about that transition.

The Wife of Bath and the Meaning of Marriage with Prof. Adam Cooper

Geoffrey Chaucer begins The Canterbury Tales describing the beauty of April and the countryside coming back to life. It is the time, he tells us, “Than longen folk to goon on pilgrimages.” “And specially,” he adds, “from every shires ende / Of Engelond to Caunterbury they wende.”

A small company of pilgrims forms and, as the go, each tells a tale. 

Like the Samaritan woman Jesus spoke with in John chapter four, The Wife of Bath says she has had five husbands not to mention “other companye in youthe.” She is a wealthy woman who had been on pilgrimage as far as Jerusalem. She is also rather fond of sex and knows quite a bit about marriage.

Prof. Adam Cooper has been reading The Canterbury Tales with Wyoming Catholic College juniors and shared these thoughts.

Attuning Self to Community: Matriculation Address 2022 by Dr. Glenn Arbery

At Wyoming Catholic college, “Ours is an education of immersion: immersion in the Western tradition, immersion in the beauty and challenges of the wilderness, immersion in the treasures of our Catholic spiritual heritage.” Last Monday fifty-six freshmen, back from their 21-day backpacking expedition, began their immersion at Wyoming Catholic College.

It is customary, as you might imagine, for the college president, Dr. Glenn Arbery to address the new freshmen. Here is what Dr. Arbery had to say last week to the Wyoming Catholic College class of 2026.

Journeys Among the Dead by Dr. Glenn Arbery

In his poem The Four Quartets, T. S. Eliot wrote:

“What the dead had no speech for, when living,

They can tell you, being dead: the communication

Of the dead is tongued with fire beyond the language of the living.”

In Homer’s Odyssey, Virgil’s Aeneid, and Dante’s Divine Comedy, we read about encounters with those who have died. Odysseus seeks wisdom from the prophet Teiresias and his mother, Anikleia (Odyssey 11.1-224). Aeneas meets his father Anchises, parent and prophet (Aeneid 6.739-983). And Dante holds a long conversation in Heaven with his great-great-grandfather, Cacciaguida who also assumes the role of prophet (Paradiso 15-17).

What can we learn from these fictional encounters with the dead? Dr. Glenn Arbery gave this introduction at the 2022 Wyoming School of Catholic Thought.

A Semester of Latin Hymns with Prof. Eugene Hamilton

NUNC, Sancte, nobis Spiritus,
unum Patri cum Filio,
dignare promptus ingeri
nostro refusus pectori.       

Now, O Holy Spirit (given) for us

One with the Father (and) the Son

condescend to enter [us] at once

(you) having been poured into our breasts

Wyoming Catholic College students study Latin during their freshman and sophomore years. From there they move to two years of Latin reading groups. One of the groups this last semester read Latin hymns including Nunc Sancte nobis Spiritus.

Prof. Eugene Hamilton—better known simply as Magister—led the reading group along with Dr. Travis Dziad. Prof. Hamilton is our guest on this podcast.

”Ode to Constantine XI” with Prof. Adam Cooper

O last of Rome, among small-minded citizens,

The bickering children of your mother’s house,

Your gaze was calm and grave and kind

As is the glowing lamp

Upon the holy ikon’s deep-set brow.

Those lines are from the latest issue of the Wyoming Catholic College publication Integritas. They are the beginning of a poem called “Ode to Constantine XI” by Prof. Adam Cooper. While this podcast has featured any number of conversations about poem, it is a rare treat to feature a poem along with the poet.

To read "Ode to Constantine XI in Integritas click this link.

 

George Herbert’s Easter Poems with Dr. Glenn Arbery

Lord, who createdst man in wealth and store,

      Though foolishly he lost the same,

            Decaying more and more,

                  Till he became

                        Most poore:

                        With thee

                  O let me rise

            As larks, harmoniously,

      And sing this day thy victories:

Then shall the fall further the flight in me.

 

These lines are from George Herbert's poem "Easter Wings." Herbert, a contemporary of William Shakespeare and John Milton, lived 1593 to 1633. In addition to being a poet he was a Church of England priest and theologian. Wyoming Catholic College president Dr. Glenn Arbery has long been an admirer of Herbert’s metaphysical poetry including “Easter Wings” and a poem simply entitled “Easter.”

The Nature of Poetry: Socrates‘ Dialogue with Ion with Dr. Pavlos Papadopoulos

Each semester here at Wyoming Catholic College, we hold an “All-School Seminar.” All students, faculty, and any interested staff read the same work and meet in groups led by our seniors to discuss what they’ve read. This fall’s All-School Seminar was Plato’s dialogue between Socrates and Ion.

In the dialogue, Socrates greets Ion, a rhapsode, that is, a reciter of poetry. Ion specializes in the work of the epic poet Homer—The Iliad and The Odyssey. When Socrates meets him, he is returning from a religious festival where in competition with other rhapsodes, he took first prize for his recitation.

This week, Dr. Pavlos Papadopoulos, shares with us about Socrates’ and Ion’s conversation.