By Robert Royal
What follows is an adaptation of a lecture delivered at the Chesterton Academy, Vero Beach, Florida, on February 19, 2026.
Those who already participate in this wonderful institution do not need me to tell them the inestimable value of reading great books even at an early age. And to those who may be discovering this academy for the first time, let me say that I myself would have been grateful to be able to attend a place like this, which unfortunately did not exist when I was young. It was a great need then, and it is even more so now, when we have lost even more of our religious and cultural heritage. And I do not exaggerate when I say that, without educational institutions like this one, the days will quickly become darker and more chaotic both for the United States and for Christianity.
But there is a way out, as I have tried to suggest in the previous title, taken from a poem in The Lord of the Rings, by Tolkien:
The Road goes ever on and on,
Down from the door where it began.
Now far ahead the Road has gone,
And I must follow, if I can,
Pursuing it with eager feet,
Until it joins some larger way
Where many paths and errands meet.
And whither then? I cannot say.
Now, like all poems, this one admits multiple meanings, and like every good poem, it has a sense that goes beyond even those meanings, because it opens a door to the world, to a wider world and to some greater path of which we must remain aware if we want to remain fully human. That, it seems to me, is the crucial value of the Chesterton Academies, even as they teach the most habitual skills that we all need to conduct our lives in our more mundane world.
As I said, I did not have the benefit of a school like this one, but I did have two key advantages, in addition to growing up in an intact family: a Catholic Church that, in its liturgies and schools, transmitted a great deal implicitly. I have often joked that the young nuns who taught me as a child probably never read Aristotle or even St. Thomas Aquinas. But the Church that formed them had, and they transmitted that rational sanity from those two great figures, a sanity that fit perfectly with the ordinary virtues that we also lived at home.
And there was something else: Latin. Like many boys my age, I memorized the responses to what we now call the Traditional Latin Mass; even today I could recite several of them from memory. Memorizing the responses in Latin had the advantage that one could serve at Mass; and one could also leave school to serve at funerals, often almost all day, and receive tips for those and for weddings. So Latin has always had a certain basic esteem for me, and even today Latin words possess a certain aura.
There was another experience that set me on that wider path that I hope to continue traversing. It must have been late fall of my junior year, right after Thanksgiving, because I played American football and the season had ended. There were still autumn leaves on the trees. We were reading Virgil’s Aeneid in Latin, in the last hour of class. After school, I was walking with some friends toward someone’s house under those autumn colors.
Out of nowhere, a sense seized me of the long stretch of time and the recurring seasons and all the people who had lived and died since the days of Virgil, which were also those of Jesus, in a way that I still cannot fully express. But I knew, and I have known since then, that there existed some wider path; and since then I have worked to be worthy of it and to transmit some part of it to others.
I would not say that this is the only purpose of true education, but it is central. As our most recent Doctor of the Church, St. John Henry Newman, once observed: «The problem for the statesmen of this age is how to educate the masses, and literature and science cannot provide the solution.»
Today many assume that technical knowledge and public schools are all we need to form citizens and flourishing human lives, with science on the rationalist side and literature or the humanities more broadly on the humanist and emotional side. Newman thinks that this is not only wrong, but a dangerous illusion, because «deductions have no power of persuasion.»
Now, by this he does not mean anything against science or reasoning in their proper place. They are human goods because human reason and intellect are gifts from God. And—under God—they can produce many good things.
But this is the most important thing: «deductions have no power of persuasion. . . . Persons influence us, voices move us, looks subdue us, facts inflame us. Many men will live and die for a dogma: no man will be a martyr for a conclusion.» We all know this from having been moved by the image of Jesus in Scripture or by the influence of a father, teacher, coach, professor, or pastor.
A martyr is someone willing to bet their own life on a truth. That is what the first apostles did, and in that way they converted the greatest political power of their time, the mighty Roman Empire. Arguments and analyses come afterward.
By contrast, when years later I was at an Ivy League university, I don’t think I learned much that has remained with me. Except for somehow stumbling upon the names of Chesterton and Dante. Nature, as we know, abhors a vacuum. And one of the most insightful things, among many, that Chesterton wrote is that the problem today is not even that people are ignorant; it is that they have been taught so many things that are not true.
So having to discover such jewels on one’s own is not ideal, which is why we need schools like this one. With truly great books, we want early encounters and with reliable guides. Because, although books are crucial, they are far from being the only thing that is.
For example, it was not until Martin Luther that someone believed in a very dubious proposition: sola scriptura. No book writes or interprets itself. The books of Scripture were defined by the Church. And an authority is needed to ensure that they are not twisted toward meanings they never intended to have.
Much of life and experience went into the production of the Old and New Testaments, and into the lives of saints, scholars, martyrs, confessors, priests, religious, and ordinary people who stood firm in basic truths to create the tradition that envelops us. We do not invent these things. We inherit them and build upon them. The so-called «self-made man or woman» of modern societies is one of the greatest illusions ever perpetrated on the human race.
But there is some truth in that idea, properly understood. Let us remember the end of Tolkien’s poem: And whither then? I cannot say.
Many overlook that last line. Firmness and a certain security are needed at the beginning, but finally we all must row out to sea, where we cannot predict what we will see, because that would be living according to a map and not in a living place. Security, certainly. But for some things we must take risks. Sometimes great risks must be faced to achieve the great.
And it is something that God himself wants for us. To truly be on the Road—the Road, ἡ ὁδός in Greek, was what the first Christians called their faith—is an adventure. Children like adventure stories and expect to live them. Jesus called himself «the way, the truth, and the life.» He is not just some wider path, but the widest Road of all.
And so, we should all think of ourselves as walking on his Road, because the Christian life, life in God’s land, is a thrilling adventure, unique to each of us in the best sense of unique, not as an exercise in romantic self-definition, but as the reception of the singular life that God gives to each one.
And the same holds for institutions. This academy opened just last fall. So you are still on your inaugural journey, with many emotions, welcome and unwelcome, ahead. It is good to be prepared for them and to welcome them. There is an ancient Greek saying: «A ship is safe in harbor, but that’s not what ships are for.»
So I wish you many great emotions and adventures as you begin this academic venture. Some wider path. And may your tribe increase.
About the author
Robert Royal is director of The Catholic Thing and president of the Faith & Reason Institute in Washington, D.C. His most recent books are The Martyrs of the New Millennium: The Global Persecution of Christians in the Twenty-First Century, Columbus and the Crisis of the West y A Deeper Vision: The Catholic Intellectual Tradition in the Twentieth Century.