St Benedict, contemplation and the search for knowledge should be the bedrock of a 21st-century Catholic education, says Mark Jenkins
The 17th-century mystic poet Thomas Traherne said that there is no knowledge without an understanding of the place of the known in an invisible, inner hierarchy of being: “He knoweth nothing as he ought to know, who thinks he knoweth anything/ Without seeing its place and the manner how it relateth to God, angels and men,/And to the creatures in earth, heaven and hell, time and eternity.” For Traherne, an education is not merely the acquiring of “knowledge”, the gathering and correlating of facts. Instead, an education is coming to see the significance of the whole, which requires faith in the existence of that, largely unseen, whole.
Since at least the 17th and 18th centuries, western educational models have been moving away from a contemplative understanding of the world to a more materialist one. In so doing, such models have come to make examinations and degrees the criterion of intelligence. However, although Enlightenment-conditioned educational models have nurtured and developed cunning minds – minds capable of controlling and manipulating the world – they have not nurtured minds that are capable of discerning matters fundamental to the health of civilisation, such as the ability to discern meaning.
A true intelligence is one that has the capacity to perceive the essential, the what is. A true education is one that seeks to awaken that true intelligence.
The kind of educational models that emerged in Europe, following the triumph of Christianity over pagan Rome in the fourth century AD, were contemplative. In the west, Benedictine monasteries were considered to be great centres of learning precisely because they were rooted in contemplation, the kind of contemplation that can only emerge as a result of a radical change of heart, a radical reversal of the way in which the world is seen, a change the Gospels calls “repentance”, rather than the kind of rationalist-based knowledge that had underpinned the pagan mindset of the Graeco-Roman world.
A contemplative basis for education, of the kind practiced in Benedict’s monasteries, for example, prevailed in the west until the late-medieval era, when increasingly secular educational models began to emerge, such as with the founding of universities like Paris, Oxford and Seville.
The widespread destruction of monasteries that took place across Europe in the 16th century marked a further movement in the direction of an increasingly secular and rationalistic approach to education, and marked the final demise of contemplation as the accepted basis, at least in the Latin west, for knowledge.
The word “faith” in the Gospels is a translation of the Greek word pistis, and does not mean blind belief, but simply a conviction that there is more to be known than can be known through the physical senses. Christ’s Transfiguration on Mount Tabor was the moment when His disciples awoke from their sleep and began to see him in the light of faith. During His descent from that mountain, Christ encountered an epileptic boy surrounded by a multitude without faith. The Greek word which is translated as epileptic means, quite literally, “moon struck” or lunatic. Followers of Christ believe that without faith we are all moon struck, we are all cut off from reality.
Contemplative knowledge derives from “sight” of the primary, intelligible or spiritual realities of things, whereas “knowledge” that is not derived from such realities is mere assumption, what Plato called an “extremely shabby thing”. Although often, and incorrectly, categorised as a rationalist, St Thomas Aquinas understood the link between faith and knowledge. He distinguishes between the intellect (intellectus), the organ through which a man can intuit or contemplate, the invisible realities that are revealed – at least to those who like an eagle can “see” the Light of the Sun, the starting point of true knowledge – and reason (ratio), which moves towards an intelligible truth by going from one thing to another.
The influence of the European Enlightenment upon current educational models, religious and secular, remains such that the connection between contemplation and knowledge continues to be forgotten. Despite the postmodern rejection of the Enlightenment’s faith in the capacity of reason alone to discern truth, most schools and universities continue to study religion in a rigidly rationalist way. Modern educational programmes emphasise the rational and the search for explanation.
However, as history shows, man does not live by bread alone. He needs meaning and orientation. The real intellect will not be satisfied until it has found its rest in God, which was and remains, precisely, the goal of a contemplative education – the goal of a truly Benedictine education. The crisis of our times is similar to the crisis that brought an end to the Graeco-Roman world in the early centuries AD. We need educational programmes, once again, of the kind that brought the west out of the Dark Ages and laid the foundations of European civilisation.
We need educational programmes that are able to return the head into the heart and thereby restore a sense of the deep link that exists between true intelligence and love. True knowledge requires the ability to feel and imagine as well as to reason. True knowledge also requires a denial of self. Only through such a death to oneself can the mind be truly opened, only then can the world be seen in the light of truth and love. Any solution to the world’s current ecological crisis, a crisis caused, fundamentally, by our failure to love, will only come through contemplation, rather than “green growth”.
But contemplation requires faith, and faith does not come easily to the Enlightenment, and indeed the post-Enlightenment-conditioned mind. But it seems to me that the postmodern mind is restoring a sense of awe about the mystery of existence, and in this way the possibility of a return of faith in God is being opened up. Our educational institutions, however, remain stuck in the Enlightenment way of doing things.
The head of the RS department of a well-known Anglican public school where I taught for three years frequently extolled teachers not to teach in a “faith-based way”. But scientific discoveries in the 20th century crushed the view that the universe is comprehensible by the human mind alone, quantum physics discovering, for example, that, as contemplatives know only too well, things are not quite as they might seem.
Additionally, the Enlightenment’s divorce of mind from matter and its depiction of man as an individual, a disconnected, self-contained onlooker of the universe, has been replaced by a concern for the discernment of meaning, and a focus on the inner world, rather than the outer world, as well as the importance of communities and networks – the wider whole. In other words – contemplation!
We can see a resurgence of the contemplative mindset in the popularity of therapy, where people seek to uncover the deep layers of their being, as well as that of the world, together with an appetite for a return to inner authenticity, as well as in epistemological frameworks that are centred in the heart, rather than the head. Furthermore, impending ecological catastrophe means the postmodern mind is heavily focussed on the consequences of what happens when mankind exploits and dominates nature, rather than seeing it contemplatively – ie in the Light of Christ rather than the light of the moon.
In his book After Virtue, Catholic philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre says that we are waiting for another St Benedict. It will be through contemplative lifestyles, of the kind that underpinned the communities founded by St Benedict, that we will relearn, as that great 20th-century philosopher Edmund Husserl told Edith Stein he himself had, that it is only through God, the seeds of Whom lie in the depth of every human heart, that we can see God.
It seems to me that it will be through a recovery of the insights of the pre-modern, Catholic, contemplative tradition that there will be the best chance of a successful response to the educational crisis of our times.
Only through contemplation will future generations be able to see the world in the light of faith, the world as it really is.
Only through faith will future generations begin to recover man’s godlike capacity for reason, a capacity lost to Adam at the Fall, but restored to humanity through the death, resurrection and transfiguration of Christ, the Second Adam.
Mark Jenkins is a writer, consultant and teacher of philosophy and religious studies. He is currently preparing a book about Byzantium and Mount Athos
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