We cannot hope to achieve an end without knowing what the end is. An archer will not hit the bullseye – except by fluke – unless he can see the target. Do we have a clear idea of the end of Catholic education?
For St Thomas Aquinas, an end has a double character: it is the last thing achieved in execution, but the first in the order of intention. The end as conceived by the mind directs the first vertical step of a person climbing Mount Everest. The curriculum and pastoral system of a school will inevitably be informed by the view taken of the end, or aim, of education. What sort of person do we want to see leave our schools? It would be difficult to improve on the formulation given by Pius XI in his encyclical Divini Illius Magistri: “The true Christian, product of Christian education, is the supernatural man who thinks, judges and acts constantly and consistently in accordance with right reason illumined by the supernatural light of the example and teaching of Christ.”
In his De Veritate, St Thomas, standing on the shoulders of St Augustine, asks whether one person can teach another and be rightly called a teacher. His answer has nothing to do with the idea that teaching is putting knowledge into a pupil as one would place shopping into a basket. It is the pupil’s own natural light of reason that does the heavy lifting in learning. The teacher simply uses external signs such as words and visual aids to encourage this process. “It happens in the acquisition of knowledge that the one teaching leads another to a knowledge of the unknown in the same way as the learner would lead himself to the knowledge of an unknown by a process of discovery.” St Thomas derives from Aristotle the insight that teaching, medicine and farming are auxiliary or assisting arts. Farmers do not create the principle of growth of their plants; they simply assist the natural processes of fertility and nutrition.
One person “is said to teach another because the teacher proposes to another by the means of symbols the discursive process he himself goes through by natural reason, and thus the natural reason of the pupil comes to a cognition of the unknown through the aid of what is proposed to him with the aid of instruments.”
Commenting on the words of Our Lord, “Do not be called teachers, because you have one teacher, Christ”, St Thomas underlines the secondary role of a teacher in learning: the primary factor is the light of human reason instilled in the pupil by God Himself: “We are forbidden to call a man a teacher in a way that attributes to him the principal part of teaching, which belongs to God.”
This reductionist view of knowledge as something that can be dropped into the mind of a pupil in the end commodifies and trivialises the purpose of education. What do modern educators make of Aristotle’s understanding of knowledge as a state of soul? Learning is something that produces an interior change in a person, a change that is permanent or, at least, abiding. What is truly important in life are the changes we produce within ourselves rather than the acquisition of external goods, which produce no inner modification of our being. What place do the three intellectual virtues of wisdom, understanding and knowledge have in modern education? For Aristotle and St Thomas, humans are rational animals. The healthy development of a human being and the promotion of human flourishing involve the perfecting of our intellectual powers, to the extent of our natural ability, rather than just the random acquisition of bits of knowledge. Most people today seem to have a purely utilitarian view of education: we study to pass examinations that in some vaguely understood way will help us enter the workplace. Little thought seems to be given to the intrinsic value of what is studied or how it contributes to a flourishing and happy life.
St Thomas defines the good of humans on the natural level as “the perfection of reason in the cognition of the truth and the control of the lower appetites according to the rule of reason”. Aristotle had already noted that his contemporaries were divided about whether it is the intellect or character that should be chiefly kept in view in educating. Here we see St Thomas achieve a synthesis and subordination. A child grows in knowledge and understanding of the surrounding world. The mind becomes conformed to the reality it encounters rather than creates. For example, to understand the point of behaving justly a child has to develop the intellectual understanding of a universal human nature and the ontological equality of all human beings. How the child responds to this reality is the other crucial aspect of education: the conforming of the appetites and affectivity to this reality through a growing interior understanding of objective reality and through the guidance and training given by parents and teachers. Aristotle sees the essence of this training of affectivity as upbringing from earliest youth to feel pleasure in what is objectively good and pain in what is bad.
Teaching morality involves more than just a course in ethics. Our ends and values reflect the sort of person we have become. For St Thomas it is precisely the gradual acquiring of the moral virtues of justice, fortitude and temperance that ensures the correct ends of human action, with prudence allowing us to choose and execute the means that will lead to those ends. These virtues are acquired by habituation and experience as much as by explicit instruction.
The ethical system of Aristotle and St Thomas is one of love and desire. The notion of “ought”, so problematic in modern philosophy, has only a secondary role. Even St Thomas’s conception of law as an “ordinance of reason for the common good promulgated by one who has care of the community” highlights the law as a thing of the mind rather than the will, which is why an unjust law is no law at all. A voluntaristic presentation of morality, in which certain actions are bad simply because God forbids them, far from convincing, will repel the mind of a young person. I know from my own experience that using St Thomas’s treatment of the human good, virtues and psychology provides a satisfying and convincing way of developing pupils’ inner understanding of the moral life.
What has Aristotle to teach us about Catholic education? It is well known that grace presupposes and builds upon nature. With his immersion in Aristotelian philosophy, St Thomas was able to emphasise the rational foundations that underpin Revelation. Living in a society that impugns the Faith on almost every side, our pupils should be given every help to see the rational coherence of the teaching given by Our Lord to His Church and how the natural virtues find their full development in the life of supernatural grace. “I have come that they may have life, and have it more abundantly.”
Dominic Sullivan is Head of Classics at the London Oratory School
This article first appeared in the February 2022 issue of the Catholic Herald. Subscribe today.
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