Teacher: The modern world isn’t the only world there is, though. There is another world and it is at play right now—it’s a world behind the modern world, beneath it, beyond it—and you might need to walk around in this world “for more than ten minutes” in order to understand how things work there. [This book] is an artifact from this other world, and the way I’m interpreting it for you is a skill born of this other world. Every day during class, I do my best to present this world to you—to create entrances into it, so you can spend a little time there and see “how they do things there.” But, it’s difficult.
Student: Why?
Teacher: Because it’s not a physical place and I can’t force you to go there. It’s an intellectual place, a spiritual place, and the only way to enter this place is to genuinely want to be there—and you have to want to be there before you fully understand what it is.
Student: I’ve never heard anyone say anything like this before.
Teacher: That’s because it’s a bit alarming to hear it stated in such terms, even though it’s the most accurate way of describing it.
Student: What is it? What is this other world? Does it have a name?
Teacher: Yes. Your world, the modern world, is the immanent world. The other world is the transcendent world.
Student: And what’s your relationship to the transcendent world?
Teacher: As a classical teacher, I’m an ambassador of the transcendent world. My job is to present the transcendent world to you in such a way that you’ll want to take up residence there, be naturalized, and become a subject.
Obviously a conscious choice to use “subject” instead of “citizen” in the final sentence.
Christian Leithart 