Why on Earth? A Psychiatrist, Philosopher, Comedian and Theologian Discuss Darkness, Suicide and Hope

Why on earth would anyone agree to spend Valentine’s Day chatting with a psychiatrist, and existentialist philosopher, and a comedian about suicide? 

Suicide rates in the United States have been going up at least since 1999. I was heartbroken when a student I mentored at Yale took her own life. The social isolation caused by the COVID-19 pandemic has only made a bad situation worse. I was speechless when one of my best friends lost her husband to suicide in 2020.

When the organizers of the New York Encounter, an annual meeting sponsored by Communion and Liberation, the ecclesial movement started by the Italian priest, Father Luigi Giussani, asked me to moderate a panel on suicide, I agreed. The three panelists with whom I met on Feb. 14 were Aaron Kheriaty, professor of psychiatry at the University of California at Irvine School of Medicine, Mary Townsend, assistant professor of philosophy at St. John’s University in Queens, New York, and Jeremy McClellan, an international stand-up comedian and recent convert to Catholicism.

I’ve written several scholarly papers focusing on moral agency of the mentally ill, the importance of narratives to heal from trauma, the reasons people give for turning to illegal drugs or alcohol to cope with mental illness, and how prayer and meditation can relieve some symptoms of mental illness. Like my own work that aims to integrate philosophy and theology with social sciences, each of the panelists brought his personal faith and theological insights to the discussion.

Before taking the stage at New York University’s Sheen Center, I knelt down before the tabernacle in the chapel and asked God to guide me. Still nervous, I gulped down too many pieces of Valentine’s Day chocolate and drank nearly double my normal daily caffeine load. 

Then I grabbed the microphone and stepped out on stage wearing black pants, a white shirt and pointy red high heels. Staring into the stage lights, trusting there was a camera streaming my words, I welcomed the thousands of virtual participants to a painful yet crucial discussion on suicide.

Some of the questions we addressed included: How do we understand the interplay of various factors that cause mental illness? When and how can medicine and therapy help mental illness, and how can prayer and confession help us grow in the virtues that strengthen our will?

Can discussing the reality of rising rates of suicide with our friends, students and loved ones open up a basic existential question: Why did we come into being in the first place? If my life is imperfect, is there a perfect being out there? How can people of faith communicate hope to people plunged in darkness?

In many of our universities, even Christian ones, when a student commits suicide, there is virtually no forum to take seriously the very question: Why is it good that I exist as opposed to not existing? Pondering this question can be the beginning of a deep philosophical inquiry that can lead to hope in a perfect being who fulfills our deepest desires.

From a Catholic perspective, mental illness can never be purely understood as simply biological, nor as simply a spiritual struggle. We are a unity of mind, body and soul. As more people seek out psychiatric medications or therapy to help with mental illness, it’s important to remember that Christian hope doesn’t come in the form of a pill. Nor can a therapist heal our wounds from sin. Together, medicine, therapy and the sacraments can help us grow in the human and theological virtues we need to experience lasting happiness. 

Suicide is not new to the human condition. But given its rise in the last two decades in the United States, it is almost inevitable that each of us will know someone who takes their life. One thing we all shared is that when say when someone you love loses someone to suicide, the most important thing is to be present. Death is not a problem to be analyzed and fixed.

The longer I live, the more I realize that loving and suffering, living and dying, are two sides of the same coin of being human. All of human experience — including its most tragic elements — needs to be brought into the light so we can better understand that we are created in love, fallen in sin, and redeemed by an all-loving God.

Talking about suicide makes me nervous, perhaps because there is no perfect answer to tragedy. But I can’t use scholarly description, the eschaton or salvation as an excuse not to look at the darkness that penetrating so many hearts. For some people, our human brokenness is a sign that reality is ultimately chaotic. As a Catholic, I can share with anyone of any faith background, or no faith at all, my hope that despite human fallenness, the basis of all reality is God’s merciful love.

The season of Lent, with its penitential practices of almsgiving, prayer and fasting, is a time of entering into the darkness so that the light of Christ can shine on those we encounter. We never know what darkness someone may be fighting, but we do know that we are called to share the hope we have that comes from certainty in the resurrection on Easter Sunday. 

Article was originally published online by National Catholic Register.

Lessons from the Cheese Nun

Margarita Mooney speaks with Sister Noëlla Marcellino, OSB, about community and charity, creation and decay, scripture and nature, the elemental and the eternal, as seen through cheesemaking and traditional monastic life today.

Margarita Mooney : Sister Noëlla, what led you to join a monastery?

Sister Noëlla Marcellino: In the late 1960s and early 1970s, college students from East Coast cities started going to a Benedictine monastery in Connecticut, Regina Laudis. We were not looking for a monastery, nor did we have any interest in Saint Benedict. Even though we had been brought up Catholic, many of us had stopped going to church.

That was the time of the Vietnam War. We had lost faith in our government and in authority. After visiting Regina Laudis, a friend told me, “I think you would love it there.” I could not imagine that I would. But, like others, I still went. We were at wonderful universities, but we were wondering why we were there, and what the future held.

The monastic community invited us to meet at the monastery every few months as a group. They saw in us a kind of a lost innocence. I fell in love with this community of amazing women. They reintroduced us to life-giving structures; they helped us see the need for discipline in our lives.

I discovered I had a religious vocation, and it shocked me. I had not been thinking of being a nun, believe me! People ask, “How did you know?” I think it is the same way you know when you fall in love with someone. It is a mystery. You cannot really describe it. But you know if you do not pursue that religious vocation or pursue that person, you will regret it. I have had no regrets. It has been a beautiful life.

What does it mean to be a Benedictine?

Saint Benedict lived around AD 480 to AD 547 in Italy. As was the custom then, his parents sent him to Rome to study. At this point, though, the Roman Empire was in decline through barbarian invasions and moral and political corruption. Saint Benedict did not want to stay in Rome. So he left and eventually went to Subiaco, staying in a cave by himself for three years. That was probably not his parents’ plan for him! Eventually people started coming to him for guidance and counsel.

Before Saint Benedict’s time, the desert fathers in the East were hermits who lived alone. Saint Benedict, however, felt that men needed to live together to be saved. We call him the Father of Coenobitic Life: monks or nuns living in common. He started thirteen monasteries in the area of Subiaco. A priest actually tried to poison him at one point, so he eventually went to Monte Cassino. There he wrote his Holy Rule for monks, which has lasted for centuries and which both monasteries and laity live by.

The Rule may seem dry to some, but you have to picture the kind of monastery he had. Many of the wealthy were giving their sons to the monastery. He had mere children there. He had barbarians. He had people who could not read or write. So to bring this community together he had to lay down many rules, which were informed by his insight into human nature and his compassion for others. For example, he said you have to have two vegetables at the meal in case someone cannot eat one kind. In a particularly beautiful chapter, he says you have to give the strong something to strive after but also be very aware of the weak and the fragile. “Let him always distrust his own frailty and remember that the bruised reed is not to be broken.” In that sense, everyone is not treated the same. And that can be hard in community.

One element that distinguishes the Benedictine way of life is the principle of ora et labora – work and prayer. Saint Benedict valued getting your hands dirty. Why is manual labor so central to the Benedictine way of life?

For one, he says idleness is the enemy of the soul; he wanted to keep the monks busy. But he also says a monk is truly a monk if he lives by the work of his hands: the sustenance of the community, taking care of the land, cooking, taking care of animals.

Work can also open up a whole new world to you. In Pope Gregory’s dialogues about Saint Benedict, he said that just before Saint Benedict died, he had a vision of the whole world in a ray of light. That is something that we ponder because we feel it is constitutive to being a Benedictine. It is a comprehensive vision. And yet, how do you even begin to comprehend the universal? You need a way in, a specific entrance point. We call the area in which we each work an “elemental.”

Coming into the monastery, I certainly never had milked cows or worked the land. Most of my generation had not. Of course, everyone cleans the house, does dishes, and other things we all do, but we encourage each person to find and develop a specific area she loves. You want people to be passionate about something. You do not want a community of sad people!

Also, work is an aspect of our lectio, meaning reading and meditating. Work enriches our spiritual life. Many of the Fathers of the Church would use analogies of creation to explain something about the church, or a mystery, or a sacrament. St. Augustine said although some people learn about God by reading books, put your book down. Look around. Look at nature. “There is a great book: the very appearance of created things.” In doing so, you get a chance to read creation over and over again. As you read creation – in my case, it happened to be cheesemaking – you can make analogies to spirituality.

Can you tell us more about lectio, and about the analogies between something specific in the material realm and the spiritual realm?

Take cheese, for instance. The enzymes of microorganisms responsible for cheese-ripening are extremely important. Their metabolism breaks down the fat and the protein in cheese and produces flavor that we like. Enzymes are catalysts that enable a reaction. They bring together two components and then disappear. An enzyme itself does not change. But it is a mediator that brings together two things.

By analogy you need mediators like enzymes in a community of people, people who do not act out of self-interest. I learned about this principle of community life in part through my experience as a microbiologist. Eventually, I became known as “the Cheese Nun.”

Mother Noella Marcellino holding a sample of her Bethlehem cheese in her cheese cave at the Abbey of Regina Laudis in rural Connecticut. Photograph by Nicholas Gill.

How was it that your monastic vocation led you to earn a PhD in microbiology from the University of Connecticut? Is it common for nuns to go back to school and get advanced degrees?

It is not common for cloistered nuns to get advanced degrees in agriculture. Ten years earlier, two members of the community had been sent for degrees in fine arts and horticulture at Michigan State University. Sending four of us at once to the University of Connecticut, with such a commute, was a first and a big sacrifice for the community. Initially I was asked to study nutrition in relationship to my work in cheesemaking. We are a small farm, and we were up against industrial farming and regulations. The community decided to send some of us for advanced degrees so that we could defend what we were doing with traditional agricultural methods.

But none of us had really studied agriculture. To ultimately proceed to an advanced degree, I had to take undergraduate courses because I had never completed a bachelor’s degree. It was a long process, especially for someone who in high school avoided all science and math! Suddenly, after twelve years as a nun, I was taking algebra and trigonometry. It was a challenge. I never could have done it without the support of a strong community.

At that time the Nutrition Department at the College of Agriculture at the University of Connecticut was very clinically oriented. I arrived with the smelly, moldy cheese that I had developed over the years according to a traditional French recipe. I did not fit in well into the department. It was the microbiologists who eventually appreciated what I was trying to do. So I ended up studying microbiology in the College of Liberal Arts. I later went on for a doctorate in that same department. I was also blessed to get a Fulbright scholarship to France where I studied biodiversity and the natural succession of native cheese-ripening fungi within traditional caves.

So your journey from the Vietnam War protest movement into a monastery eventually led you back to college and then to cheese caves in France?

Yes. Many years earlier, a young woman from the Auvergne region of France had visited the Abbey and shared a recipe with me for making cheese using a very traditional technique taught to her by her grandmother. I spent many months implementing the technique, and I fed many disasters to my community and to our pigs. When she visited the Abbey two years later, she was amazed to see that the same fungi growing on the surface of her cheeses in France were growing on our cheeses in our cellar in Connecticut! This was a natural ripening process, and the appearance of identical mold suggested that our visitor’s cheesemaking technologies and natural ripening process selected for the microorganisms that give this cheese its distinctive flavor.

I had access at the Abbey to our natural cave, but I needed access to other caves to continue my work. So, I applied for a Fulbright and got it, and then the National French Agricultural Labs gave me a fellowship for three more years. Actually, the woman who founded Regina Laudis, Lady Abbess Benedict Duss, had come from France to found the Abbey in America. Even though she was an American, she spent most of her life in France and survived World War II there. For us at Regina Laudis, it was very meaningful to have a project so rooted in the French soil.

Would you say that cheesemaking has helped you understand what a good human life is and grow in the virtues?

Yes. As a part of my Fulbright scholarship, I not only studied science, but I also delved into the history and lore of the caves and the culture around them. It was quite moving to see how, for these traditional cheesemakers, especially those who lived through World War II, cheese was so connected to charity and love of neighbor. They had a sense of gratitude because they had been given this fruit of the earth. In fact, many of the dairy cooperatives are called just that in French – fruitières, from the Latin fructus, a Roman term connoting the right to use (usus) and benefit (fructus) from an asset you do not own. The cheesemakers believe that if they have this cow, this milk, then you share that with others. Cheesemaking is part of the bounty that God has given you to share.

One woman, a dairy farmer, told me the story of her husband, who during World War II was a member of the Resistance and had been captured by the Gestapo. She thought he would never come home. When her husband came home alive and she saw him standing at her door, she knew that he had lived because she had shared her dairy products during the war.

Creation is finite. All of what lives also decays and comes to an end. In the case of cheese, that decaying becomes part of the flavor we enjoy. As a Benedictine, how do you understand creation and decomposition? Does decomposition in the natural world, like cheese decaying, tell us something about the spiritual journey?

Flavor is created through breakdown. The components of cheese and milk are lactose – that is the carbohydrate in milk – protein, and lipids, or fat. In the environment of a cheese rind, microorganisms get their nourishment and a place to grow. Their metabolism in turn contributes enzymes that break down the components of milk, transforming the flavor and consistency of a young unripened cheese into an aged creamy cheese with a distinctive aroma.

I have come to think that the process provides us with an unconscious way of preparing for death. We eat a breakdown product, and it is delicious. Even though it is the end of a cycle, at the same time, there is something opening up that is unexpected.

When people visit monasteries, even if they know nothing about the history of the Benedictines or understand their charism, how can they enter into your way of life? What are people looking to experience during their visits?

Sometimes, what happens to people who come to the monastery is not what they expected. Many women come to the Abbey to have time away from their families and away from what they have to do every day. It is their rare occasion for contemplative time. They will cry and say, “I don’t know why I’m crying.” I think it is because they finally have a chance to get out of the rat race of everything that they have to do. It is the same with professional women working in the world. They feel they cannot be too vulnerable in their professions. They have to keep a certain persona within their professional lives. But when they come to a monastery, they can let go.

I also think that because of the grille, because of the monastic enclosure, people feel safe. In this place apart, they might leave with new insights. In The Ratzinger Report, published in 1985 before Cardinal Josef Ratzinger became Pope Benedict XVI, Ratzinger said there was a misunderstanding of contemplative life. Monasticism used to be called the flight from the world, but: “You didn’t go apart from the world to abandon the world, but you are set apart to get another perspective. The monasteries tried out new models of civilization to give back to the world.” That is what we hope a guest would find in coming: a new perspective, new insights, and rekindled energy to go back to her family and profession.

For those of us who visit a monastery seeking peace and then go back into our daily lives outside the monastery, how do we step out of the rat race of life?

When my friends and I first went to the monastery and found peace, we would be so afraid to leave, thinking, “Uh-oh. When I go home, is this going to all go away?” But the more we went, the more it stayed with us.

At the Abbey, we give a lot of attention to each person to help her become who she is meant to be. In the prologue of the Rule, Saint Benedict talks about this. We call it the bonum, the good. What we find is that many visitors often have no sense of the good that is in them, of who they are, and that they are good. People just get ground down and do not realize how beautiful they are. They do not know the gifts they have; they are unaware of the gifts their families gave them. So, we encourage each one to find her bonum, the good that she brings, and to develop it.

Having welcomed young people as visitors to the monastery for so many years, what advice do you give them for discerning the will of God in their own lives?

For one thing, find time to be apart from your daily life where you can be more vulnerable and listen. When you go to an abbey, you get to speak to one of the nuns or the guest mistress. They help you try to figure out what has prompted you to come in the first place, or to identify an intuition or passion you want to pursue. We are not counselors, but we feel people come looking for peace. We try to help people find that peace.

One of the things unique to monastic life is that we live the cycles of life – of birth and death – with creation. We celebrate the liturgy, the cycle of Christ’s life. I think back to that first visit with my friends to the monastery when we were college students. Coming into the monastery, we felt despair over the Vietnam War and the death we were seeing. We felt we could not affect anything. But by living out the rhythm of a liturgical cycle, we learned that while death is a reality, there is a resurrection on the other side.

This article is adapted from Margarita Mooney Suarez, The Wounds of Beauty: Seven Dialogues on Art and Education (Providence, RI: Cluny Media, 2022), Chapter 3: “The Beauty of God in Cheesemaking and Chant.”

The Poetic Body of the Benedictine Charism

What did John Henry Newman mean when he wrote in his essay “The Mission of St. Benedict” that the discriminating badge of the Benedictines is poetry? By saying that the Benedictine charism was poetry, Newman does not mean that Benedictines spent all day writing poems. St. Benedict did not found a religious order aimed purely at mystical knowledge—experiences of God that remain in the soul, and tend towards silence. In contrast to monks who fled the world to encounter God in solitude, St. Benedict’s Rule was written to guide communities in living elemental aspects of Christianity—such as shared meals, shared prayer, and shared work. Life in common is the Benedictine monastic path toward God.

As the philosopher Jacques Maritain writes, “poetic experience is concerned with the created world and the enigmatic and innumerable relations of beings with each other.”[1] Poetic knowledge expresses itself in work through a dynamic process: “Poetic experience is from the very start oriented toward expression, and terminates in a word uttered, or a work produced; while mystical experience tends towards silence.”[2] Poetic knowledge is therefore communication between the soul and the world, since:

The soul is known in the experience of the world and the world is known in the experience of the soul . . . In poetic intuition objective reality and subjectivity, the world and the whole of the soul, coexist inseparably. At that moment sense and sensation are brought back to the heart, blood to the spirit, passion to intuition. And through the vital and nonconceptual actuation of the intellect all the powers of the soul are also actuated in their roots.[3]

In Newman’s words, the gift of the Benedictines is a way of being in the world that “lets each work, each occurrence stand by itself—which acts towards each as it comes before it, without a thought of anything else.”[4] Newman even calls this approach to life a “mortification of reason,”[5] but that is not because St. Benedict and his many followers devalue scientific or conceptual knowledge reached through reason.

Rather, at times, our tendency to analyze, measure, and manipulate needs to be forgone in order to return to a childlike, simple state of perceiving reality that opens up to a sacramental way of living—seeing in visible things the invisible grace of God. The Benedictine vision reminds us that to see the totality of things and to live a contemplative life in the ordinary work of manual labor and repetitive daily routines requires an attentiveness to the present moment and commitment to particular people and places. Being present to all of reality—without having to always conceptualize our experience or analyze things scientifically—is a way of encountering God intimately and simply, like a child who wonders at the beauty of each flower and rejoices at every bird in the sky.

By calling the Benedictine way a simple, almost childlike way of living, by no means was Newman discarding the importance of Benedictine contributions to science (in particular through agriculture), as well as letters (for example, St. Bede the Venerable, the English historian and Gospel translator). Indeed, the Benedictines have plenty of cause to boast of their great saints who exemplified holiness, such as Saint Anselm or Saint Hildegard, both of whom are Doctors of the Church.

Newman contrasts the Benedictine gift of poetic living to the noble, but distinct, mission of other orders in the Church that sought to be apologists for the faith, teachers in the pulpit, professors in the chairs of universities, and rulers of the Church. The Benedictine way counteracts the miseries of life with beauty. Benedictines model how to have an open ear listening to God and a heart ready to receive the truth.

Newman’s summary of the Benedictine way of life from his essay on the Benedictine Schools summarizes beautifully the particular gifts of the Benedictines: simplicity, commitment to place, routine, hospitality, and seeing the totality of reality. Benedictines see the sparkling of divine creation in every living organism, from the sky that covers all of creation to the microbes of the soil. As Newman writes:

The one object, immediate as well as ultimate, of Benedictine life, as history presents it to us, was to live in purity and to die in peace. The monk proposed to himself no great or systematic work, beyond that of saving his soul. What he did more than this was the accident of the hour, spontaneous acts of piety, the sparks of mercy or beneficence, struck off in the heat, as it were, of his solemn religious toil, and done and over almost as soon as they began to be. If today he cut down a tree, or relieved the famishing, or visited the sick, or taught the ignorant, or transcribed a page of Scripture, this was a good in itself, though nothing was added to it tomorrow. He cared little for knowledge, even theological, or for success, even though it was religious.

He continues thus:

It is the character of such a man to be contented, resigned, patient, and incurious; to create or originate nothing; to live by tradition. He does not analyze, he marvels; his intellect attempts no comprehension of this multiform world, but on the contrary, it is hemmed in, and shut up within it. It recognizes but one cause in nature and in human affairs, and that is the First and Supreme; and why things happen day by day in this way, and not in that, it refers immediately to His will. It loves the country, because it is His work.[6]

What kind of education did St. Benedict himself envision? In reflecting on the schools started by St. Benedict, Newman points out that St. Benedict’s schools were focused on the young. What is today known as high school or higher education hardly existed in the tumultuous times in which St. Benedict lived. Academies of higher learning were for the elite. The Benedictine way of life and Benedictine education was for the ordinary Christian, the person in adult life who would engage in manual labor.

In the twenty-first century, even pre-kindergarten instructing has often shifted to college readiness, as if what matters to toddlers are the skills that will help gain admission to a college where the nearly exclusive focus on scientific and conceptual mode of living shuts out the poetic way of living that allows us to integrate our intellect with our soul. By contrast, St. Benedict followed a kind of liberal arts model of education (teaching the subjects of the trivium and quadrivium) for the young, including the Greek and Roman classics and instruction in Scripture in his grammar schools for the young. Certainly the Benedictine poetic way of living and educating—a simple, joyful emphasis on teaching languages, learning about nature, and studying the history and stories of great civilizations of the past—mingled easily with the desire to nurture a child’s wonder at the marvels of nature or history and a child’s eager intuition to find symbolic meaning in all things.

All levels of education would benefit from nurturing the creative intuition that is the engine and fruit of poetic knowledge. The importance of the Benedictine charism is evident in its power to elevate the being mode of life and shut down (or at least slow) the analytical mode of life aimed at investigating means and ends, predicting outcomes, or examining premises and conclusions. Not educating the inner core of our soul from which all other capacities emanate—including our reason—leads (and has led) to dissonance, dispersion, and the fragmentation that results from a lack of direction for our drives, passions and instincts. Pondering the Benedictine charism of poetry can positively shape the Church, schools, and culture today in (at least) three concrete ways.

First, reading and writing poems is one way to capture the complexity of objective reality and to express our own emotions—which confronts the challenge in today’s culture in that many people suffer from a crisis of attention and a lack of imagination. Catholic poet and former director of the National Endowment of the Arts Dana Gioia has argued that the study of poems and the writing of poetry needs to be recovered.[7] Writing and memorizing poetry used to be an activity of common people, not academics in universities. Studying great works of literature like the Divine Comedy matter because stories shape our imagination and guide us when making important decisions about our lives. Great literature opens our hearts to respond to the attraction of the good. Literature lights the fire of our desire for a blessed life.

Second, reviving poetic knowledge is crucial to the advancement of scientific knowledge. Marveling at the beauty of the world—whether that be the beauty of soil or the beauty of the many mathematical calculations that make a building structurally sound—is not secondary to technological advancement, but primary. As Catholic professor of mathematics and physics Carlo Lancellotti has argued, scientific advancement is driven not primarily by technological innovation but by the creative intellect that seeks to know why things work, not just how they work. Seeking to understand why things work as they do, as Lancellotti puts it, “the ultimate motivation that has led to the triumphs of modern science is essential aesthetic.” The ability to marvel at the world needs to be cultivated because it is the seed of the sustained human effort to know why things work the way they do. Math, science, and engineering education that never takes students out of the controlled environment of the laboratory too often squashes the very human creativity that not only drives new scientific discoveries but also guides their application towards ends that promote human flourishing.[8]

Third, reviving poetic knowledge is crucial to liturgical renewal because poetic ways of everyday living are essential for educating the imagination and intuition as they are engaged in the liturgy. Timothy O’Malley, director of the Center for Liturgy at the University of Notre Dame, has arguedthat within the Catholic Church, many do not appreciate poetic forms of knowledge, not even in the liturgy. Is it surprising, then, that the failure to educate our aesthetic sensibilities leads to poorly done liturgy that is sense-numbing and unimaginative? Too many parishioners are unable to sufficiently focus their attention to enter into the contemplative space of beautiful liturgy. Aesthetic education in art, literature, and science can enliven liturgical experiences of the faithful and motivate clergy to celebrate the Mass with beauty. Liturgy well done is itself a form of aesthetic education.

A poetic, sacramental way of living and educating the young can never fully be conceptualized. It has to be lived and to be experienced in order to be known more fully. In the chapter on humility from his Rule, St. Benedict discusses the image of the ladder (in Latin, scala). Benedict instructs readers that:

If we wish to reach the very highest point of humility and to arrive speedily at that heavenly exaltation to which ascent is made through the humility of this present life, we must by our ascending actions erect the ladder Jacob saw in his dream, on which Angels appeared to him descending and ascending. By that descent and ascent we must surely understand nothing else than this, that we descend by self-exaltation and ascend by humility. And the ladder thus set up is our life in the world, which the Lord raises up to heaven if our heart is humbled. For we call our body and soul the sides of the ladder, and into these sides our divine vocation has inserted the different steps of humility and discipline we must climb.

This image of the ladder gives the name for the Scala Foundation, a non-profit initiative that aims to revive classical liberal arts education, of which I am the founder. Scala aims to link educational philosophy to practices and that educate the whole person, including integrating the search for truth with experiences of beauty.

Through Scala, I have led student groups to Benedictine monasteries such as the Abbey of Regina Laudis and Portsmouth Abbey in the United States, as well as Ampleforth Abbey in the United Kingdom. Each trip combined time dedicated to forming the mind with time dedicated to immersing ourselves in the Benedictine routine of the liturgy of the hours, shared meals, manual labor, and playing games. Reading Newman’s Idea of a University, Jacques Maritain’s Education at the Crossroads, and Luigi Giussani’s Risk of Education while at a Benedictine monastery allowed us to immediately put into practice the ideas of some of the greatest Catholic thinkers of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. We deepened our knowledge of the texts we read because we lived what we were reading.

These trips afforded us a slice of the original beatific vision because we lived an integrated life where everything we do, think, and feel comes from the soul, the place of the direct encounter with God, and emanates out into a sacramental way of living every moment of the day. Whether we were in the classroom, the strawberry field, the chapel, or the dining hall, the Benedictine communities created a sense of harmony with nature that produced a deep inner resonance so deeply desired by today’s students and their instructors. The unity of all activity, interior and exterior, generates peace and gently guides students into a state of productive leisure where all of our being and doing points towards the sacred.

Anyone who has tried to follow the Benedictine routine knows that the lifestyle is too demanding and the education too holistic to be conceived of as a mystical floating above earthly realities or a retreat from the world’s conflicts. The simple, daily routines of manual labor, prayer, study, and a shared way of life, along with a spirit of attention to the divine in the liturgy of the hours and lectio divina of both Scripture and nature captivates students’ hearts and prunes their minds. Poetic knowledge can guide scientific and conceptual forms of reason to be used more in harmony with our souls.

As Pope Benedict XVI notes in his address Quaerere Deum, the Benedictines transformed European culture slowly, but not through a political strategy. Little wonder that he chose the name of Benedict for his papacy, as he argues that the Benedictine monastic tradition that reveres the word of God and all of creation is both “what gave Europe’s culture its foundation—the search for God and the readiness to listen to him—[and] remains today the basis of any genuine culture.”[9] The Benedictine influence on society is the result of its producing resonance and harmony in the soul which in turn sow the seeds of life-giving culture. In the past, the Benedictine commitment to preserving ideas of the past, living in community, and preserving the land to be bountiful brought order out of chaos. It surely can do so again.

The curricular fragmentation in schools at all levels and the interior dissonance of students are not unrelated. As a result, the Benedictine charism is being studied, experienced, and applied by educators who, like myself, will not become monks or nuns, but are looking for a way to purify today’s educational systems. Educators need positive examples that can be drawn from the Benedictines in order to build on the good of today’s culture and of current school structure. It is important to critique the obsessively achievement-oriented, narrowly pragmatic, and ultimately soul-draining forms of education, while also being inspired by models that help educators swim against the stream where an understanding of the Benedictine (and Catholic) vision is missing but its influence is nevertheless felt. 

Benedictine communities are an embodiment of a tradition that has preserved a living expression of a unified, simple, yet also glorious and joyful way of Christian life and education. Monks and nuns working the land and running schools who welcome student groups for agricultural work, retreats and seminars can be hospitable guides to people from all faith backgrounds and types of schools. Benedictines offer an ancient tradition of daily living and a method of education that is also ever new and capable of bringing interior and external order to our culture and our schools.

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[1] Jacques Maritain, Creative Intuition in Art and Poetry (Providence, RI: Cluny Media, 2018), 216.

[2] Ibid., 216.

[3] Ibid., 113.

[4] John Henry Newman, “The Mission of Saint Benedict,” in A Benedictine Education: The Mission of Saint Benedict & The Benedictine Schools, ed. Christopher Fisher (Providence, RI: Cluny Media, 2020), 11.

[5] Ibid.

[6] Ibid., 74.

[7]See Dana Gioia, The Catholic Writer Today: And Other Essays (Wiseblood Books, 2019).

[8]Margarita A. Mooney, “Engineering, Beauty and a Longing for the Infinite,” Scientific American, October 22, 2019.

[9]Pope Benedict XVI, “Quaerere Deum,” in A Reason Open to God: On Universities, Education and Culture, ed. Steven J. Brown (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 2013), p. 236.

This article originally published online at Church Life Journal and is adapted from the Introduction to A Benedictine Education, a collection of essays by St. John Henry Newman, edited by Christopher Fisher, with an interpretative essay by Abbot Thomas Frerking, O.S.B. The volume is a Cluny Media title, published in partnership with the Portsmouth Institute.

Tradition and Authority in Luigi Giussani’s Educational Method

For the past several years, I have assigned Monsignor Luigi Giussani’s The Risk of Education as the final book in a seminar I teach on liberal arts education. One student’s response to Risk of Education echoed what I felt when I first picked up a book by Giussani, just a few years ago. She remarked that “Giussani uses common words in uncommon ways, which is strange.” Pausing, she then continued, “But it’s also compelling.”

Giussani, the Italian Catholic priest and founder of Communion and Liberation, isn’t playing language games. Rather, the unconventional ways that he defines terms like tradition, authority, reason, verification, and provocation are actually challenges to implicit assumptions about the person and community that are expressed in our use (or misuse) of language. Thus, Risk of Education isn’t only a model for educators. It’s also a critique of modernity—and a sketch of a way forward.

Together, students and I unpack the meaning of the key terms in Giussani’s book. His vision of education awakens students to the greatness of the educational endeavor, the nobility of the mind, and the desire for authority and tradition to guide and ground one’s freedom. This grounding enables students to make further explorations while still feeling connected to something bigger than oneself.

Embodying a Tradition

Take, for example, one of the recurring words in Risk of Education: “tradition.” For the students I teach, tradition evokes something static, maybe even sterile or sterilizing. But Giussani describes tradition as an initial explanatory hypothesis. This beginning point becomes the grounds from which a student can explore and test new information. Tradition gives meaning and coherence to information as it is learned and tested.

“Authority” is another term that Giussani uses in a surprisingly compelling way. Rather than being something imposed on a passive recipient, Giussani explains, authority is a coherent embodiment of tradition. For Giussani, authority isn’t abstract; it’s personal. A humanistic, person-centered education begins with the teacher himself or herself being aware that to teach is to bring one’s entire personality into the classroom. When a teacher steps into a classroom, he or she is not just transferring content to passive recipients. Teachers do not simply facilitate discussions among people who already have the truth inside themselves, or measure learning outcomes on particular skills. Teachers personally embody a tradition, a way of seeing and thinking about the world that guides students in how they experience and test out ideas in their own lives.

It’s important for teachers to acknowledge that we communicate with our students through our being, our presence, our gaze, our wonder, and our excitement at the educational endeavor. To take that responsibility seriously is to embrace the most important part of education: awakening the desire in our students to embark on the quest for truth. This awakening must be truly personal, a communication of desire from teacher to pupil.

The Integration of Living and Knowing

Because humans are made to desire the truth, Giussani explains, we must exercise our reason to examine the totality of human experience. Some students have been told that their personal experience always gives them unmediated access to truth without the necessity of authority and tradition in a lived community of persons. Other students have been told that their personal experiences are irrelevant to what they are learning—that learning the scientific method must somehow be separated from questions of meaning, being, purpose, and our final ends as human beings. Both extremes deprive students of experiencing a coherence between thought and action, being and doing, facts and values.

Giussani’s understanding of experience is not subjective in a strict postmodern sense of the term, which would imply that every person’s experience is so unique and different that it is incommensurable with others’ experiences. Nor can Giussani’s understanding of experience be reduced to simply the sense perception of material objects. Rather, experience matters for Giussani insofar as students must seek to know the truth for themselves, verifying in their own lives what authority and tradition teach. Without this personal verification, one can’t reach certainty about knowledge. Examining the totality of one’s experience is thus crucial for assenting to the truth.

Teaching students to use their faculty of reason as a tool for endless theorizing or abstract word games distorts the very nature of reason, which is meant to lead us to assent freely to the truth. When the knowledge produced by the scientific method becomes divorced from truths about the final ends of the human person, students have no tradition from which to judge the proper use of human discoveries and inventions. Morality and ethics become divorced from reason, and are therefore seen as subjective, arbitrary, and imposed.

Students who have been exposed to a deconstructionist view of truth-seeking, a strict fact–value distinction about knowledge, or a relativist view of all morality, feel enlivened by Giussani’s understanding of reason as combining tradition, authority, and experience. As Stanley Hauerwas notes in his foreword to the 2019 revised translation of Risk of Education, all knowledge is supposed to shape how we live, and how we live our lives should shape how we think. Morality, ethics, and science aren’t strange bedfellows; they are great conversation partners.

The integration of living and knowing produces internal coherence. It allows students to stand in a tradition and communicate to others with wonder and joy the truths they have learned, using their knowledge to further the human good.

The Risk

According to Giussani, provocation is another necessary element for education. If students don’t question the coherence of a tradition, then they can’t go through the process of verification of knowledge necessary to know the truth and to commit one’s life to living according to those truths. Criticism is a drive to discover what is valuable in an idea and to explore what about that idea corresponds to one’s own experience of reality. Allowing students to engage in this provocation is why Giussani calls his educational method a risk. Teachers must love the freedom of their students as they engage in this educational process of verifying a tradition, and students must love the embodied authority—a person or a living tradition like the church—that breaks open (but does not break down) their way of reasoning to make it coherent with a way of living.

In many of the educational settings in which I have taught or studied, authority and tradition in education were hardly ever discussed. Reason, provocation, and verification were implicitly or explicitly expected to guide education, but no concrete embodied tradition was upheld as an authority or a set of guideposts for the use of my reason.

Long before I read anything by Giussani, I sensed that the fields in which I earned my credentials (psychology and sociology)—fields dedicated to studying the human person and society—were insufficient to guide me in deciding how I wanted to live. Without yet having the vocabulary to describe what I was doing, I was seeking tradition and authority.

Through years of study and reflection, I discovered through my own experience the very tradition I had been raised in. I found the intellectual coherence and personal coherence I so desired through my reading of the Catholic intellectual tradition—especially Catholic figures like John Henry Newman, Jacques Maritain, John Paul II, and Benedict XVI. Like Giussani, all of these figures attempted to take the good from the modern understanding of human freedom and integrate it into a coherent Catholic tradition that emphasizes community, truth-seeking, beauty, and our final purpose: to know and love our creator and his creation.

Person-Centered Education

Giusssani’s view of the human person as mysterious, connected to the infinite, and worthy of dignity was the central guiding concept behind all of his life, writing, and teaching. Giussani’s method of education seeks what Jacques Maritain called the true end of education: the awakening of the inner dynamism of each person. In our burnout culture, characterized by creative fatigue, we need hospitality and charity in the search for truth. We seek the certainty needed to stand in a tradition and speak with an authority that respects the freedom and mystery of each person.

Many students are attracted to Giussani’s notions of authority and tradition in education simply because it’s more authentic to stand before a young person and humbly say, “I’ve found something I’m eager to share with you, and I want to provoke you to go on your own journey for the truth,” than to implicitly or explicitly deny that teachers, mentors, and other role models are speaking from tradition with authority. This kind of authority—the kind that loves the mystery of each human so much that it wants to guide each soul in the use of the great gift of freedom—is not a burdensome imposition. Rather, it’s a helping hand on the arduous journey of knowing one’s own purpose and place in the world.

If the end of education is the formation of the whole human person—awakening our amazing capacity to know, calling us to live fully immersed in reality, and instilling in us a love for truth—then freedom, risk, mystery, charity, and hospitality must be the pillars of the educational process. We must reject deconstruction, word games, virtue signaling, political correctness, scientism, and empiricism.

Today, the powers of fragmentation in American society are affecting all institutions of civil society. Politics, the family, education, and the church are all suffering. Perhaps that is why Giussani’s bold assertion of the need for tradition and authority resonates so much with the generation of American students I teach. A liberal arts model of education acknowledges that our knowledge begins from somewhere, from some tradition: a core body of ideas and authors that is like what James Bernard Murphy calls “Velcro.” This core enables us to venture out into new areas of study and have those ideas stick to something, not shoot off in endless unconnected directions.

Giussani was clearly speaking from the Catholic intellectual tradition, as do I. But in my own work as a teacher with students of diverse Christian faiths, other faiths, or no faith at all, I have seen again and again that to acknowledge my own tradition as a starting point for dialogue is a much better way to connect to people from different traditions. To deny that I have a starting point at all, or only to admit so-called neutral visions of the human good that really come from Enlightenment philosophy as my starting point, is not authentic.

All of our talk about diversity, inclusion, and tolerance in education may flow from an appreciation for the inner mystery of each person and a longing for communion with all other humans. But that communion can’t flourish if we deny the centrality of the search for truth. In our burnout culture, characterized by creative fatigue among so many high achievers, we need hospitality and charity in the search for truth that will lead us to the certainty needed to stand in a tradition and speak to others with an authority that nonetheless respects the freedom and mystery of each person.

This article was originally published online by Public Discourse.

Fátima and Perseverance in Trials

Standing on the steps of St. Patrick’s Cathedral in New York City on May 7, 2019, I hugged the mother of a former student I had taught at Yale, John Aroutiounian, who died tragically of cancer at the age of 26. When I delivered John’s eulogy earlier that day, I clutched a rosary from Medjugorje in my hand as I told John’s friends and family that I fervently believed that if God would allow the tragic death of one of the most brilliant students I have ever taught, he would work miracles in other ways.

Less than 11 months later, on March 31, 2020, John’s mother Rouzan told me that her husband Aris had died of COVID in New York. I clutched my phone in disbelief and wept, alone at home. Aris’s death was not the miracle I had so firmly expected. As John neared his young death, I told him I do not have a perfect answer to why God might let him suffer and die so young. Nor can I explain why God would allow a second tragic loss to the same family in under a year. 

During his battle against cancer, I promised John that if he miraculously lived, I would go with him and his parents on a Marian pilgrimage. When he died on May 3, 2019, I felt called to keep my promise anyway. I spent my birthday on August 25, 2019, at the Marian pilgrimage site of Fatima, Portugal, keeping that promise.

More than just a student of mine and a collaborator, I thought of John like a son, someone with whom I could share intellectual jousting but also the ups and downs, joys, and sorrows and big questions of life. When I wrote him a letter of recommendation for a full scholarship to study law at Columbia University—one more of a long list of prestigious awards he won—I never dreamed that less than a year later, and just two weeks after he turned 26, I would be delivering his eulogy.

My first day in Fatima, I arrived early to the Chapel of the Apparitions to attend Mass. In case I had any doubt that God hears my prayers (which I often do), someone walked up and asked if I would read the prayers of the faithful at Mass. I was escorted right next to the altar built at the exact spot where Mary appeared six times to the young Portuguese peasants in 1917, asking them to pray the rosary for world peace and to offer their suffering for the salvation of sinners.

As I shed tears during the Eucharist, I knew I had received a special sign that I am not alone in my suffering. God hears my cries. God wants to give me his comfort.

On my birthday only three years earlier in 2016, John showed up at my new home in Princeton with a gift: Augusto Del Noce’s book, The Crisis of Modernity, which had recently been translated by Carlo Lancellotti. Why did he passionately insist we launch a program through the nonprofit I started, Scala Foundation, to discuss what Del Noce calls the death of the sacred and its impact on culture, politics, and identity? John got so excited about Del Noce because, having studied philosophy and law at Yale and Oxford before going to Columbia Law, he recognized in his own experience the social impact of a shift in philosophical anthropology—the basic question of who we are as humans—that Del Noce describes.

Drawing on the work of philosopher Max Scheler, Del Noce describes the consequences of as a shift from homo sapiens to homo faber in how we understand our humanity. In his essay Man in History, Scheler wrote that from the view of the human person as homo sapiens in the ancient Greek philosophy, what makes us different than animals is our rationality. Our very rationality that leads to the very idea that something other than us exists, something transcendent—not something in us, but something greater than us and also capable of interacting with us.

This rational openness to transcendence contrasts with what Scheler calls homo faber, a view of the human person as essentially made up of drives to satisfy one or another basic need for survival, power, money, or sex. For homo faber, we are not dependent on anything but ourselves. Even our spiritual experiences are somehow contained within us. Our religious rituals are really just more tools we create to get what we really want in this world. In my own research and teaching in sociology, philosophy of social science and practical theology, I am concerned about what happens when we describe human experiences of suffering and resilience without a metaphysical language of transcendence.

As he neared death, I reminded John what we had read together from Del Noce in the Scala summer seminar: without a metaphysical language of transcendence, human hope loses its connection to something sacred, other and unbounded by human nature. Our culture so often uses the word hope without the vertical dimension of dependence on God. Hope then becomes synonymous with changing oneself, self-control, or creating tools to master our environment. My own experiences of suffering have broken my illusion of self-mastery. When I acknowledge my dependence on a creator, I awaken to the reality that joy and beauty can be experienced even in the midst of suffering.

I reminded John that our faith tells us that with human hope comes the reality that we are destined for eternal life and our suffering is not meaningless. As his suffering grew worse, John told me he experienced that piercing beauty that is the presence of Jesus and he would accept his young death if God took him. John’s acceptance of his early death and his powerful encounters with Jesus as he suffered were a witness to his loved ones of the reality of our eternal home. In my eulogy to John, I reassured John’s grieving loved ones that we shall see John again and he will call us by name. Together we shall rejoice with him in the presence of our creator.

Shortly after John died, I read the papal encyclical Spe Salvi, on Christian hope, by Pope Benedict XVI. He writes that Christian hope is not a promise we will avoid suffering or triumph over evil; Christian hope in a God who promises to walk with us through the valley of death (Psalm 23). The death of a young person like John, and now the death his father and tens of thousands of others due to COVID, calls out for the language hope grounded in faith, transcendence, presence, awareness, and love; not a hope that is grounded in our modern illusions of progress, control, and efficiency.

Christian hope is not the same as progress, understood as overcoming dependency and achieving greater and greater autonomy by using reason, strategic rationality, and manipulating things with technology and science. Christian hope is grounded in faith that we are creatures of God—that he loves us, and by depending on him, we can walk through the darkness of life.

When a loved one dies, our hearts long for the future reunion to become real in the here and now. Christian rituals are so powerful precisely because they open our hearts to a deeper reality that is present now. The many rituals I participated in at Fatima—the Mass, Eucharistic adoration, the rosary, acts of penance—are all enactments of my connection to a reality that exists already but it is beyond immediate appearances. At times my prayers will seem to go unanswered and I will be sorrowful. But the answer is already there in my heart—my faith gives me hope in eternal life and with that hope I can always grow in love. As Benedict wrote, faith brings the future into the present:

Faith is not merely a personal reaching out towards things to come that are still totally absent: it gives us something . . . Faith draws the future into the present, so that it is no longer simply a “not yet.” The fact that this future exists changes the present; the present is touched by the future reality.

Spe Salvi pushes us to ask: Why do we have hope at all? Having traveled to a holy place for my birthday, the “why” I live seemed to be exactly what I was doing in Fatima because I encountered a “who”: a loving God, whom I can serve and praise in this life, and who consoles me in my sorrow. As Benedict explains:

God is the foundation of hope; not any god, but the God who has a human face and who has loved us to the end, each one of us and humanity in its entirety . . . his Kingdom is present whenever he is loved and wherever his love reaches us. His love alone gives us the possibility of soberly persevering day by day, without ceasing to be spurred on by hope, in a world which by its very nature is imperfect.

People of faith must do what we can to reduce suffering, and to console people who suffer. But people of faith have something more to offer to those in sorrow. Our faith and hope as Christians are neither naïve progressivism nor a pessimistic nihilism.

When I hugged John on his deathbed and sobbed, when I hugged his mother on the steps of St. Patrick’s and sobbed, and when I clutched my phone and sobbed with Rouzan as she told me her husband had died, my love and pain were simply tiny signs of a love we all participate in that is greater than all of our suffering. It is that love I went to Fatima searching for; it is that love my life and my work has to give witness to or else I will fail in my role as a teacher and scholar; it is that love I depend on to have hope.

Signs of that love have come to me in the many gestures of hope and comfort from my loved ones in the past year. The sublime joy of love even in the midst of sorrow reminds me that there is a place where our tears will be no more. I have also had moments when I have felt John’s absence acutely and I find it hard to have hope. I hang my head in disbelief, and the tears return. But because I have the gift of faith, eventually I feel John’s presence return in my heart.

In Fatima on my birthday last August, in a mysterious but real way, my desires were fulfilled: John was present with me. Since then, I had several moments where I am certain John is with me somehow, mysteriously. One of them was the day his father died. The day John’s father Aris died, after crying most of the day and laying all alone on my couch in Princeton, I joined a nightly COVID Zoom call with my mother and siblings to pray the rosary. My brother’s youngest child, five-year-old Gabby, normally skips the rosary.

But that day, Gabby walked up to the camera of her dad’s cell phone and with a giant smile held up the rosary from Fatima I had given her for her birthday. Then she sat next to her mother, asked instructions on how to make the Sign of the Cross, offered to lead us in the Our Father, and tried to repeat the 50 Hail Marys while counting on the rosary beads.

Although miracles that suspend the usual laws of nature can happen, the everyday miracle of a child’s love is a sign that even when we feel alone, God’s love abides in us. Although she had no idea how sad I was, her gestures were a sign of John comforting me, as he knew that her love made me happier than anything else.

When I came back from Fatima last year, I told Gabby I was there because I was sad that my friend John died.  “After someone dies, will we all be together again?” Gabby asked with fervent curiosity and solemn seriousness. “Yes,” I explained. “When we die, we all go home to God, and he brings us together again. But even here on earth, I told her, God is always with us.” “And we all have a guardian angel,” she piped in. Her face lit up with wonder when I told her, “When my friend John was near death, an angel visited me and told me he would pray for me and my friend who was dying. If you are ever alone and feel scared, don’t forget Gabby, that you can talk to your guardian angel and to Mary, the mother of Jesus.” She held the rosary I had given her and asked me if I had told her mommy I had seen a real angel. If such a wonderful thing had occurred, she must have thought, why would I not tell everyone the good news?

Another time I have sensed John present was on Holy Saturday in 2020, when I organized a video conference call to pray for the souls of John and Aris and for anyone else grieving a loss. Faces popped on to the screen from Armenia to London to New York to Kentucky to California and many places in between. We were all in isolation, and suddenly all together to mourn without touching. We were strangers many of us, we were different ethnicities and faiths, but we were united by the love of John, Aris and Rouzan. We could see each other to share in our grief.

Bishop Daniel Findikian of the Armenian Orthodox Church in the United States started the call chanting the traditional Armenian rite of prayer for the dead. Then one by one, friends shared memories of John and Aris. Both father and son had accomplished great things in their lives, but what everyone remembered them for was their humility, warmth and hospitality. Their love extended not just their own family and friends, but also to the least in this world, the outsider, the homeless, the newcomer, the struggling. Just like the disease spreading all across the world, but in the opposite direction, their love knew no boundaries.

Although the grief of a woman who has lost her only son and husband in under a year is unspeakable, Rouzan told me she is consoled by a vision of John and Aris hugging each other in heaven, rejoicing to be together again. Although we cannot go on pilgrimages right now, prayer conference calls are just one of many ways we make present the love we each received from John and Aris and all of our loved ones, spreading that love faster than this disease can ever move.

Article originally published online by Church Life Journal.

The Love of Learning and the Lay Desire for God

What lessons does the monastic approach to learning classical texts bear on our contemporary debates in education? Speaking to the College of Bernardins in Paris, Pope Benedict XVI used a beautiful image about the importance of monks singing well together to make an analogy about how we can learn to seek God together in education. Beautiful music is supposed to generate resonance—a feeling that stays with us; perhaps a gentle, uplifting feeling that gently calls our attention towards the sublime. But the opposite of resonance is dissonance, not being able to put together all the pieces of what you are hearing.

I had students in a seminar on education read Pope Benedict’s piece because dissonance in education today is rampant. Students rarely are exposed to classes that teach them how to integrate knowledge from various fields. Students accumulate tons of information, but they have no way to put together all the pieces of what they learn. They are also taught that the only truth is relativism about truth. Rather than education being a journey that forms us integrally as humans, education becomes a chore that (even if we succeed at it) fragments us.

My own studying of medieval monastic approach to learning has not led me to flee to the hills in a segmented community, but to develop an approach to education that has provided my students with precisely the kinds of resonance that learning is supposed to provide—an integration of knowledge that helps integrate one’s own very being in the world.

Pope Benedict described the monastic approach to learning as Quaerere Deum—setting out in search of God both through revelation and through nature. He called this a “truly philosophical attitude: looking beyond the penultimate, and setting out in search of the ultimate and the true.”

To know God is not only to know Scripture; to know God is also to know his action in the world as revealed in the history and world of human beings. God not only created the world, but continues to work in the world. As such, our work in the world can be seen as “a special form of resemblance to God, as a way in which man can and may share in God’s activity as creator of the world.”

Because the monks believed that God was at work in whatever was beautiful, in his book The Love of Learning and the Desire for God, Jean Leclercq describes how monks studied not only Church Fathers and Scripture, but classical texts simply because they were beautiful. Monks believed that, in some real way, everything that is good or beautiful comes from the hand of God, even if the author was not a Christian.

According to Leclercq, monks were optimistic in thinking that “everything true or good or simply beautiful that was said, even by pagans, belongs to the Christians” (116). Quite unlike today’s efforts to deconstruct and debunk classical texts for their flaws, monks made every effort to find a good intention in these works.

Monks studied scripture with great appreciation for God’s word, but they also studied non-Christian works that were beautiful and good simply to develop their appreciation for the beautiful, wherever it was. As Leclercq describes, the monks sought to:

Develop in all a power of enthusiasm and the capacity for admiration . . . Wisdom was sought in the pages of pagan literature and the searcher discovered it because he already possessed it; the texts gave it an added luster. The pagan authors continued to live in their readers, to nurture their desire for wisdom and moral aspirations (118-119).

The Monks appreciated the beauty of classical texts, and not merely because they were Christian or even moral instruction. As Leclercq explains,

At times they drew moral lessons from these authors, but they were not, thanks be to God, reduced to looking to them for that. Their desire was for the joys of the spirit, and they neglected none that these authors had to offer. So if they transcribed classical texts it is simply because they loved them (134).

Leclercq describes this approach to learning as integral humanism, a humanism that integrates classical humanism with the eschatological humanism of Christianity: that Christ became man to save us from our sins. Integral humanism seeks beauty in both the horizontal and the vertical—the world we can see and study and the world we do not see directly, yet perceive through the beauty of the world that is a sign of another type of existence.

Integral humanism is not anthropocentricism. Integral humanism can connect the worldly and the supernatural, awakening desires for truth and deep appreciation for beauty. Integral humanism celebrates nature and man’s creation, but also acknowledges its limits and dependence on the creator, and awakens our desire for the infinite.

Discussions about liberal arts cannot just be about which texts to include in a core curriculum. Christians in particular bring a unique perspective to liberal arts education not just because of the emphasis the Christian intellectual tradition places on philosophy or theology, but, more importantly, because Christians believe that all that is good, beautiful, and true comes from the hand of God.

European culture, according to Pope Benedict XVI in Quaerere Deum, grew out of this monastic approach to knowledge that revered the word of God and all of creation. He wrote that, “what gave Europe’s culture its foundation—the search for God and the readiness to listen to him—remains today the basis of any genuine culture” (emphasis mine).

But Pope Benedict XVI goes on to argue that today, we live in a culture that has made our deepest desire—to know God—a subjective, individualized search, cut off from how we use our reason about the world. Anthropocentric humanism celebrates the human capacity to know the world but separates that capacity from how we know God. Instead of elevating our humanity, anthropocentric humanism fragments knowledge and our very being as humans into disjointed pieces.

Instead of a university in which we know all fields relate to each other and that all truth glorifies God, we have a multiversity, which might succeed in producing some good things but fails to produce resonance in students, that is, a lasting impressing that our knowledge gained is part of our quest for truth.

Most modern universities where I have worked fail to generate a sense of appreciation for any traditions of knowledge and instead promote the deconstruction of past knowledge. The curriculum may be full of laudable skills to be acquired on the way to achieving learning goals in a particular class. Yet, the idea that mastering a subject should be a transformation that awakens our desires for the good and beautiful sounds, at best, sentimental, therefore unrelated to reason, or, at worst, a romantic dream that is the privilege who those who do not need a job when they graduate.

Perhaps I am lucky to have come from a home that instilled such high aspirations in me—not just about credentials and grades, but about the love of learning. For as long as I can remember, I loved learning. My father—who studied math in college and wooed my mother by tutoring her in math—taught me when I was five about mathematical theories as a sign of his love for me.

I can recall how, as a young child not even old enough for school, I used to sit next to my father studying math or geography. I felt like the world continents as well as the world of abstract reasoning about numbers was exciting. My father was teaching me something about my place in this world, instilling in me a deep curiosity about how this all came to be so. I, in turn, always greatly admired my father’s broad intellect and intrinsic love of knowing and teaching me many, many things—both material and abstract. I have long desired that exhilarating feeling that echoes with our deepest aspirations as humans when I master a topic. I rejoice when I can pass on to a student not only mastery of a topic, but the very love of learning itself.

In an educational system so dominated by credentials and skills, we are at risk of never awakening in students their desire for the truth and killing their love of learning. It is precisely through awakening desires to know the truth that our ever-more complex educational system can function like a big orchestra—all coming together to produce beautiful harmony. Instead, many students will go through the multiversity not sure which of the many loudspeakers competing for their attention they should devote their energy to. Students tell me again and again that when they get to college, even if they may be gathering up knowledge and winning accolades, their inner soul is experiencing dissonance.

I agree with the critiques others have made about higher education, but I think the biggest challenge in higher education is not that students are hyper-competitive, stressed out, and emotionally fragile—it is that students are not getting a real education. I do not just mean they are not being exposed to the classics traditionally taught in humanities classes; I mean they are not being taught to love the search for truth that all education must aspire to.

I think it is unlikely that majors in humanities are going to grow in their numbers to even their previous levels. The pull is too strong to major in STEM fields or some other field that will make money to pay off crushing debt and a rising cost of living. But integral humanism in education, or, more generally, a classical liberal arts education, could also mean that students majoring in any field could go on trips to the art museum together; or, go to a monastery for a day, or even longer. These are a couple of the many ways to awaken their full humanity in its search for the truth in every situation.

For example, in the summer seminar I taught for the last two summers entitled “Rediscovering Integral Humanism,” both shared experiences of beauty, alongside long sessions poring over texts, were important part of our time together. We spent several days at Oxford reading authors like John Henry Newman, Jacques Maritain, and George Marsden. In our free time, we went to Evensong at Magdalene College, or went for walks in nature. During our eight days at Ampleforth Abbey, a Benedictine monastery near York, we not only continued our intense pace of study, we also walked to see the sheep and pigs at the monastery, played games together outdoors, ate meals family-style around a big table, and sang the liturgy of the hours with the monks, or just sang with each other spontaneously.

Studying and living together at a monastery for eight days made the monastic approach to education come alive. It is not just that the animals and fields are beautiful, it is that the beauty inspires creativity and deep thinking. Open landscapes helps us open our mind. Stunning sunsets over the lake excite the senses, call our attention both outward and inward at the same time, preparing us to think deeply and slowly in our reading sessions.

As one student remarked in her evaluation,

The setting of the seminar, particularly in Ampleforth, made it very natural to stay in a contemplative mindset. And living and eating together made it feel like we were a family, with all the relational depth and play that goes along with that kind of dynamic. The readings/discussions exposed me to many different viewpoints and disciplinary approaches, while also giving me a much deeper understanding of my own area of study; I was able to view it—and was forced to articulate it—from the perspectives that others brought to the discussion.

This particular student was from a family of eight children, had attended Princeton University on a full financial need scholarship, achieved great accolades in the classroom and service, and had been active in a Christian ministry. But the seminar we shared together was unique because it allowed her to enter into a contemplative mindset, to get to know others' perspectives and personalities, as one does with siblings, and to be challenged by each other’s ideas in the seminar discussions.

But I was perhaps even more struck by her expression of how the seminar resonated with her humanity, leaving an impression that she is known and loved; with a feeling that that our time together was permeated by something bigger than all of us (the love of God) that holds us together. As she wrote:

My most lasting impression from the seminar will be the infusion of God’s love in all of our time together. I felt whole, like I was known and loved. The lingering taste of these deep and beautiful friendships will, I hope, lead me onto communities that will foster my growth in wisdom and self-giving wherever I’m called to next.

Beyond the material we mastered—which was quite a lot—the experience resonated with her deepest longings to search for truth with others, and the delights of the mind were shared alongside experiences of beauty.

The most profound memory I will take back with me from our time together at Ampleforth was walking in silence as a group for about an hour from the monastery to the lake to see the sunset together on the last evening. I noticed how everyone’s walking style was slightly different. Some were slow while others practically ran. Some looked like they were skipping, whereas others swayed side to side.

When we arrived at the lake, we stood in a big group by the lake and made a circle, hugging each other as I offered my final reflection on our twelve days together. I remarked that our distinct walking styles headed in the same direction reminded me that each of us came here on a journey, and our journey was personal, yet we are accompanying each other on our journey. We are in fact, self-interpreting animals who seek the company of other self-interpreting animals. As a Christian, I believe that humans are part of nature, we build many things including culture and, yes we have the image of the divine in us that can be communicated to others in love.

The beauty of that final moment together in nature solidified for all of us our memories of what an amazing experience we had together. I told the students that in times of worry and doubt—times that I know will come as I am a weak human—I will remember our lively seminar discussions, our singing, our walks in nature, our many shared meals, our intensely personal conversations, and find my faith, hope, and love renewed in remembering you.

The seminar was an experience of our total humanity in a world that feels so fragmented. My final words to the group were to go forth in love to a world that feels polarized, divided, angry, and confused. The love of God we felt pouring out during our search for truth together is something we need to communicate to others—not just to our friends who think us like, but also to those who do not understand us, and those who do not want to understand us. A monastic approach to education does not have to mean creating communities apart from the world, but can also mean witnessing by our approach to learning a greater truth—that, despite our often grave differences, we are all on a journey together, united as creatures of one God that we all seek, perhaps by different names that point to one reality.

The monastic approach to education—Quaerere Deum—fits well with our seeker generation whose lives are filled with dissonance in their education and their personal lives. Many of today’s young people—regardless of their faith background or where they are on their faith journey—desire to live a theological aesthetic in their everyday lives, which have been stripped of the sacred.

Seeking God in all things—revelation and nature, seeing God active in faith and in reason—is a bulwark against the dominant language of science that is empiricist—the only thing that is real is material. Such an approach to the world reduces all of created reality to something to be manipulate. Quaerere Deum is a bulwark against educational practice that lead to endless deconstruction of truth—there is goodness and beauty in the world, there is truth we can discover and share with others. The critical approach cannot lead us anywhere without the appreciation of the beautiful and the good.

But a response to our crisis in education through learning once again to seek God in all things is not a formula, nor a curriculum, but a journey, one that takes its time, that goes deep, and in so doing, slowly transforms the world around it, even a world that may seem hostile to it. Like a great piece of music, Quaerere Deum, an approach to education that is both deeply satisfying yet also leaves us longing for more: the infinite.

This article was originally published at Church Life Journal.

Engineering, Beauty, and a Longing for the Infinite

In July 2019, I embarked upon a six-day excursion across Italy with 14 undergraduate students and three professors from Princeton University. The trip was part of a six-week summer course titled “Two Millennia of Structural Architecture in Italy.” Given the title, it should come as no surprise that the instructors were professors, not of architecture or history but of civil engineering.

But the course, sponsored by Princeton’s Institute for International and Regional Studies Global Seminar Program, was about much more than understanding how buildings were, and are, constructed. Too often, STEM students are understimulated in wonder, beauty, awe—the kind of childlike curiosity and enthusiasm for discovery that can incite great innovations in science and engineering. Studying beauty in the university has too long been relegated to departments of art or music or literature—but Sigrid Adriaenssens, Maria Garlock and Branko Glisic recognized the need to educate engineering students, too, about history, culture, people and art.

What was I—someone whose work lies at the intersection of sociology, theology and philosophy—doing on this trip? Our modern world is driven by a view of the person that sees us as essentially driven to dominate others, acquire endless personal gain or develop powerful technological skills. The aesthetic dimension of the human person—our desire for beauty—often seems to get left out of not only business and engineering but also much of the social sciences. Our disciplines present an implicit model of the human person as essentially a social product, a profit-maximizer or a great big machine.

But is that all we are?

Humans are born with a desire for beauty, but that desire, like any desire, needs to be nurtured—cultivated like a garden. Any good education must include an education in beauty; likewise, any field of knowledge that is stripped of the beauty of its object, whether that be a machine, a book or a person’s life, will be stripped of its mystery. As made clear in the experiences of famous scientists captured in the book by Marco Bersanelli and Mario Gargantini, From Galileo to Gell-Mann: The Wonder that Inspired the Greatest Scientists of All Time: In Their Own Words, studying the natural world sparks awe and wonder.

My training in the social sciences implicitly borrows methods of positivism or empiricism that do not just correspond to the human person in an integral fashion. Social sciences collect empirical data, but they also need and philosophy, theology and a language of beauty, wonder, awe and love. We are creatures who do things, but we are also creatures who contemplate things. We can’t live a flourishing life simply by satisfying our basic needs (even the need for surviving a motorcycle crash). Engineers and other specialists need to work together to build the products that serve our human nature, including our desire for awe and wonder.

One of the reasons universities structure learning across disciplines is that different ways of looking at the world train our minds in different ways: reading a text; proving a theorem in math; closely observing an object in its surrounding; pondering the meaning expressed by a piece of art; and building a bridge all require different types of cognitive skills, which need to be honed, tested and pruned.

And that was why we were in Italy. During the excursion, students learned about Italian architects including designers and icons of design: Brunelleschi, Canova, Ducati, Dainese, Nervi, Michelangelo, Palladio and Pisano. For six days, the students, professors, guides and I were immersed in the beauty of educating ourselves on the genius, risk-taking, and leaps of faith that create amazingly useful products—including motorcycles that dazzle us with their speed; airbags that protect us if we fall; churches that have inspired centuries of worshippers; and tobacco factories that were once abandoned but which are being repurposed for the technology of a new age.

During the many stops in our whirlwind tour of Bologna, Vicenza, Venice and Florence, we studied varied objects with the aid of experts. In Vicenza, for example, the art historian Guido Beltramini, an expert on the architect Andrea Palladio, took us to villas, bridges and a theater Palladio designed. We walked along the shop floor of the Ducati motorcycle factory, then met with Andrea Ferraresi, Ducati’s Design Director. The businessman Federico Minoli, who has been the CEO of Ducati, spent several days with the students, explaining what it takes to bring a great invention to the market.

We also visited the Dainese Archive, and met Lino Dainese, founder of the company and inventor of beautiful, comfortable and very safe motorcycle jackets, boots and even an exploding jacket airbag. Dainese, whose patented inventions have saved hundreds if not thousands of lives, insisted to the students that he’s not an engineer or a designer, which are fields he has not formally studied. But he is a lover of beauty and a lover of people. His passion is to save the lives of those so fascinated by the mystery of the infinite they would ride a motorcycle at 350 kilometers an hour, or up a treacherous mountain peak.

He made it clear that technological scientific discoveries are often made by people whose hearts long for the infinite. And along with the others we met, he showed us that the buildings, objects of art and machines we use every day came about through a creative genius that integrates beauty and function. But learning the biography of great inventors further showed the class that no creative genius exists in a vacuum. Even they make mistakes and need help from others.

Trips such as this provide a much-needed opportunity to bring together all the ways our minds work and to learn from each other’s observations. Watching professors “geek out” about all the complex mathematics that went into building the structures we visited was a person-to-person way of communicating the joy of scientific innovation.

As Branko Glisic kept pointing out, something can’t be beautiful if it doesn’t work. A bridge that looks nice and collapses never was beautiful in the first place. Students found beauty not only in perfection, but in an abandoned tobacco factory built by Pier Luigi Nervi in Bologna now being repurposed as a meteorological center. Seeing the millennia of structures being made out of earlier structures from classical, Renaissance and, now, modern architecture inspired wonder in us at human ingenuity that can preserve traditions of beauty while also adapting existing structures to new purposes.

Without educating all forms of knowledge toward mutual coherence, without standing in a tradition of thinking and being, our varied emotions, thoughts, expressions and even the things we create in a laboratory don’t add up to anything more than noise. Fleeting sensory pleasures or tools that badly fit the needs of humans don’t lead to human flourishing.

Connecting STEM and the liberal arts is crucial for the simple reason that, as one student wrote, “whether created as monuments to God, places to live and entertain, or ways to travel, structures are inevitably built for humans to enjoy.”

A liberal arts education is supposed to make us free. Modern education can’t just be focused on productivity but must engage with the core questions of truth, beauty and the good across all fields. Universities exist to help the young understand the past, preserve what’s good from it, discover new forms of knowledge and know how to apply that knowledge for the human good. Integrating the study of engineering and beauty will not only help students be more creative and take risks; it will help them resist the reduction of the human person to merely an object buffered from the transcendent.

Education in all fields of knowledge—including science and engineering—should be understood as part of educating the universal human longing for the infinite.

This article was originally published at the Scientific American.

Already and Not Yet

On Palm Sunday 2021, I sank into a pew at St. Mary of the Assumption Catholic Church in Ft. Worth, Texas, my heart heavy with grief. The day before, I had had breakfast with a former student, James. He revealed that his father—a successful businessman, evangelical Christian, and well-known philanthropist—had committed suicide in July 2020. 

The news of yet another suicide left me feeling despondent. On Palm Sunday, I did not feel God's love. Instead, I was asking God how he could let so many tragedies happen. My thoughts and emotions left me unable to pray. As I struggled to listen attentively to the long Palm Sunday readings of the passion of Jesus, I began to picture the agony in the garden, where Jesus called out to his father to take this suffering from him, if he willed it.

Spurred by Jesus’s anguished petitions, I cried out in my heart, “Why Lord, do you let these things happen? How much more suffering must this world endure? When, Lord, are you coming again?”

And in my heart I heard, “I’m already right here with you.”

I stared at the crucifix—the ultimate sign of love—hanging behind the altar. Then I looked one by one at the stations of the cross. Word and image united to move my heart to remember that Jesus is with us in our pain. He suffered so we can be redeemed.

But somehow that didn’t feel satisfying. I thought, “That’s not good enough!”

Then I heard, “You need to be my hands and my feet to the suffering.”

My heart of stone melted. I realized that I can’t walk into Mass demanding that God fix my problems the way I see fit. I walk into Mass to receive his love, so that I can respond with faith to whatever problems may come my way. Liturgy isn’t a magical rite that gives us godlike power to manipulate the world with a foolproof plan of action. Liturgy is an act of worship that reminds us we are creatures who depend on a loving God. Liturgy speaks to our broken hearts, to our grief, anger, and confusion, and brings us into dialogue with Jesus.

Recently, while teaching Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI’s book The Spirit of the Liturgy, I was reminded that because of the incarnation, crucifixion, and resurrection, the chasm between heaven and earth has been broken open. The liturgy is a kind of work through which God makes his dwelling in the world. The liturgy is one powerful way to see our earthly dramas and tragedies as part of a larger narrative, one that reminds us God has made a covenant of love with us. Participation in the liturgy can help us heal our wounds.

As Benedict XVI writes, “creation exists to be a place for the covenant that God wants to make with man . . . creation, history and worship are in a relationship of reciprocity.” We live in an earthly reality, but we are also journeying toward our final fulfillment, which has already been inaugurated by the coming of Christ. The liturgy fulfills our desires to experience God here and now, while also preparing us for greater communion with God to come. Worship anticipates the completion of creation.

The liturgy is therefore not an escape from reality, but an anticipation of what we were created to become—and therefore a participation in a deeper reality. Liturgy becomes a symbol of all of life, a life we live, as Benedict said, “already and not yet.”

The liturgy, Benedict XVI writes, represents the drama of God's departure and his return, what he calls “a kind of turning around of exitus and reditus.” Through the liturgy I participated in on Palm Sunday, I was reminded that being near suffering is an invitation to journey in this circle of exitus and reditus. Liturgy is an embodied and mysterious reminder of the covenant of love to which God calls us. When the news cycle and our personal lives are pulling us toward acts of despair, the liturgy can renew our hope in God’s promises. Liturgy can strengthen our love so we can be the hands and feet to wounded friends and neighbors in this wounded nation.

We who are dedicated to a robust civil society must ask ourselves: What response do we have for the many thousands of those who struggling with mental illness and fear during COVID? How we can respond to the tragedy of suicide with hope for those who feel hopeless?

One response: As we continue to address COVID risks and begin to reopen our schools and public institutions, we must do all we can to bring the faithful back to liturgy in person, where anguished hearts can renew their covenant with a God whose promises are already, and also not yet, coming true.

Margarita Mooney Clayton is associate professor at Princeton Theological Seminary and founder and executive director of Scala Foundation. This article was originally published at First Things,

Why Choose Mystery Over Ideology?

When I took a wrong turn while driving with students in Rhode Island in the summer of 2019, we found ourselves driving over a bridge clouded in fog, seemingly going into nowhere. When we came out of the fog, I tried to make a U-turn and ended up going around several jughandles before getting back on the same foggy bridge going the other direction.

Back in our classroom at Portsmouth Abbey and School in Rhode Island, students drew an image of a car going over a bridge into the fog to represent Luigi Giussani’s educational philosophy as described in his book The Risk of Education. Giussani paints a picture of education as an adventure in which we start off our journey feeling as if our inner light is clouded in fog, but we have faith that we can reach certainty about our questions. Reaching certainty then leads us to ask other questions, and we go into the fog again, with confidence that our journey is not in vain.

For the past five summers, I’ve gathered with students through a Scala Foundation program to ponder contemporary challenges in education. For many students, schooling has become so-called strategic learning—studying for a certain grade on a test. Other students gravitate toward activism—learning for the sake of changing the world.

Giussani’s writings on education become memorable precisely because they evoke reactions whereby students experience precisely what they’ve been missing in education—curiosity and questioning. Just like the sense of adventurous joy we felt as we crossed the foggy bridge in Rhode Island, Giussani sparks my students’ imagination. Reading Giussani together, it’s like we have set off into the fog, riding together, getting excited about what we learned, and then turning around, ready for more.

Giussani’s emphasis on mystery is one idea that seems “relevant” to students. What “problem” does the notion of mystery solve for them? Giussani unpacks for students just why a so-called problem-solving approach to education, where all knowledge must have relevance to change this world, has unintended consequences. What students are missing in education today are awe, curiosity, and contemplation. The beginning of education is not changing the world, but being attentive to all of reality, including its symbolic dimension.

Why has our modern system of education become obsessed with problem-solving to the detriment of a contemplative view of education? Could it be possible that we are so obsessed with transforming the world that we’ve lost the joyous adventure of forming the inner dynamism of young people to lovelearning?

Central to Giussani’s vision of education is his view that reality—both human nature and the things we create with knowledge—has a symbolic dimension. As Giussani writes, human reason is not only about discovering causal laws, but our reason looks at reality as a sign: “Our nature senses that what it experiences, what it has at hand, refers to something else. We have called this the ‘vanishing point.’ It is the vanishing point that exists in every human experience; that is, a point that does not close, but rather refers beyond.”

For Giussani, humans are beings who live in a particular time and history. Yet we also have a cosmic origin and final end of communion with God. That’s why Giussani emphasizes that education has to form young people in reason and faith, science and mystery, action and contemplation.

Students come to my seminars to ponder questions like: How does a liberal arts education form us as integral persons—mind, body, and soul? What is poetic knowledge, and how is it related to scientific and conceptual knowledge?

Jacques Maritain’s work Creative Intuition in Art and Poetry, delivered as a series of lectures in the spring of 1952, is both history of art and philosophy of humanity. Maritain’s Creative Intuition is an exploration into the spiritual preconscious from which stems poetic knowledge that helps unite beauty, truth, and goodness. As with his other, perhaps better-known works, Maritain’s exploration of art and poetry points to a similar conclusion: there is a part of the human person that is an irreducible mystery where the encounter with God happens, but that inner element of us is profoundly shaped by the practical intellect through which works of art and poetry are created.

One of Maritain’s main claims is essentially one about intellectual history and culture: poetic knowledge has been forgotten. For many, only the scientific method is ever objective, whereas literature, poetry, art, and other forms of beauty can be nothing but subjective.

Maritain aims to restore the relationship between reason and beauty, stating, “Reason does not only consist of its conscious logical tools and manifestations, nor does the will consist only of its deliberate conscious determinations. Far beneath the sunlit surface thronged with explicit concepts and judgments, words and expressed resolutions or movements of the will, are the sources of knowledge and creativity, of love and supra-sensuous desires, hidden in the primordial translucid night of the intimate vitality of the soul.”

As part of our rational nature, therefore, art and poetry are capacities to be honed, refined, reflected on, growing gradually toward perfection. Because art and poetry bring new objects into the world, Maritain argues they form part of the practical rather than the speculative intellect: knowing for the sake of action, of bringing something into existence. Participating in art and poetry forms our identity and subjectivity into beings who have stable inner qualities that enable us to use our many human capacities for the good.

In his book Education at the Crossroads, Maritain directly engages with perhaps the most influential philosopher in American education: John Dewey. For Dewey, the scientific experiment is the only road to objective truth. In A Common Faith, Dewey wrote, “There is but one sure road of access to truth—the road of patient, cooperative inquiry operating by means of observation, experiment, record and controlled reflection.” Dewey called his approach to knowledge nothing less than a “a revolution in the seat of intellectual authority.”

Religious creeds, which used to be thought of as indicating objective knowledge, must be separated for Dewey from religious experience. Religious values are important to democracy, but “their identification with the creeds and cults of religions must be dissolved.”

Observing European politics in the first half of twentieth century, the Italian philosopher Augusto Del Noce feared that reducing values to subjectivity and enshrining only science as true quickly leads to scientism, a reduction of all truth to the scientifically verifiable. The most powerful in society are those who claim the mantle of scientific truth. As he wrote, once rendered subjective, every argument about values becomes seen as “merely ideology” and “an instrument of power.” Without shared objective values, a greater separation between elites and the masses emerges. Our social fabric tears.

Maritain warned that the downstream impact of Dewey’s philosophy, which negates contemplative truth, is a culture that will end in a “a stony positivist or technocratic denial of the objective value of any spiritual need.”

Are we surprised that today so many students today lack meaning, purpose, and hope?

One poorly understood aspect of this crisis of meaning is the neglect of the relationship between beauty, truth, and virtuous living. At my seminars, students are eager to talk about how to recover poetic knowledge alongside scientific knowledge (scientific method) and conceptual knowledge (abstractions, like laws, procedures, rules).

Experiences of beauty awaken our desire to know the splendour of the truth and prepare us to enter into virtuous relationships characterized by self-gift.

Understanding poetic knowledge as a virtue of the intellect helps explain why education must expose students to beauty. Beauty is poorly understood in much of education and culture as just one more form of self-expression rather than a form of self-transcendence. The classical understanding of beauty was that experiences of beauty awaken our desire to know the splendour of the truth and prepare us to enter into virtuous relationships characterized by self-gift.

Yet many educational institutions have forgotten beauty. Our technological society provides endless sources of entertainment that are like junk food: images and soundbites momentarily satisfy a craving to experience something, but then leave people with a deeper need for true nourishment for the soul.

The result of the neglect of objective beauty in education and culture is that much of our schooling stops at teaching us how to manipulate the world. Most educators, administrators, and policy-makers have lost sight of the power of beauty to draw students into contemplation of beauty and truth in ways that give them meaning, purpose, and hope.

In my recent book, The Love of Learning: Seven Dialogues on the Liberal Arts, I ponder the crisis in modern education with seven scholars, all of whom practice a life-giving form of liberal arts education.

In one dialogue, George Harne, a professor of music, former president of Magdalene College, and now dean of the University of St. Thomas–Houston, explains, “There is an irreducible dimension to poetry, as there is to life. We want students to recognize through liberal learning that sometimes you cannot cross all the ‘t’s and dot all the ‘i’s. There are parts of life that are irreducible in their complexity; the process of understanding life is always unfinished. Poetry can prepare us to encounter the mysterious in life, and it can inoculate us against certain ideologies that claim to explain and control everything.”

Without experiences of beauty to draw us into contemplation, education risks becoming purely cognitive and functional and culture becomes desiccated.

In another chapter of my book, the mathematical physicist Carlo Lancellotti says, “We live in a crisis of abstraction. We think that once we have analyzed things, that’s all there is, that the idea is exhausted by our analysis. Everything gets filtered through some kind of pre-prepared abstract screen. Experience is replaced by our abstract explanations of experience. What is really missing for so many today is the perception of beauty, and beauty as an opening to the mystery of God.”

Humans are made for something more than utility, problem-solving, and relevance. Beauty is the door that opens onto that greater reality. Without experiences of beauty to draw us into contemplation, education risks becoming purely cognitive and functional and culture becomes desiccated. What we learn is rendered as a set of techniques for manipulating the natural world (natural sciences) and our fellow human beings (ideologically tainted social sciences and humanities). We lack shared stories that unite us.

Beauty is the spark of liberal arts education and scientific creativity. Beauty draws us out of ourselves, arrests our attention, and leads us to contemplate our world, the people around us, and ultimately God. Beauty is the glimmer, the gleam of being. Beauty awakens our hearts to the splendour of being alive and the desire to know reality in its fullness and complexity.

The void left by the denigration of beauty and a classical liberal arts education is directing more and more people to “woke” social justice activism or alt-right movements because those movements offer them meaning, purpose, and hope, as well as community and a sense of belonging. Others burn out psychologically or resort to social isolation because trust and intimacy are hard to experience. Yet others resort to drugs, pornography, or another temporary pleasure to fill the void. Still others pursue ambitious and demanding careers without reflecting on how they should live or why they exist to begin with. The result is skyrocketing rates of anxiety, depression, and suicide. Educational institutions have not succeeded in addressing these problems, leading many people to seek alternatives to feed their minds and souls.

The students I teach are dying to return to learning as a mysterious adventure. Social justice activism, for instance, offers this adventure, but if our social and political commitments end up reducing our contemplative side to purely subjective experiences, then we have—perhaps unwittingly—adopted an underlying view of the person and of reality that has eradicated mystery.

If all knowledge is a tool to change the world, then man, not God, is at the centre of reality. Anything at all is possible, but nothing is true. For today’s generation, as for the students Giussani taught, the idea that our scientific knowledge can create any reality we want with no limitation rings hollow. Ideologies abound because soundbites promise simple explanations. But ideology never produces a well-rounded human person—without which, Guissani warned, social or political good cannot come about.

Beauty is the glimmer, the gleam of being.

As Giussani wrote, “If we consider our nature to be the image of the mystery that made us, to be participation in this mystery, and if we understand that this mystery is mercy and compassion, then we will try to practice mercy, compassion, and fraternity as our very nature whatever the effort involved.”

Integral human formation must recover education in beauty as the seed to sow the fertile ground to cultivate the fruits of intellectual virtue, restore the love of learning, and bring joy and trust into friendships, all the while retaining the personal discipline required to master and prudentially use knowledge.

My students often ask, What can unite us socially and politically? I respond that in order to reunite as a society, we have to reunite beauty, truth, and goodness. We have to choose mystery over ideology.

Article originally published by Comment Magazine.

Death Is a Veil — and Love Is Eternal

About halfway through a two-and-a-half-hour liturgy at St. Vartan’s Armenian Orthodox Cathedral on April 25, 2021, a giant curtain closed between the congregation and the altar. Staring at the cross embroidered on the curtain, my heart cried out, “Death is a veil!”

In those same pews a few years earlier, I had sat with John Aroutiounian, a student I worked with while I was on faculty at Yale. John wanted to introduce me to his Armenian Orthodox heritage through the liturgy. Just a few years later, on May 3, 2019, days after he turned 26, my heart was torn apart when John died of cancer. Around 11 months later, on March 31, 2020, I collapsed in tears when I heard John’s father Aris died of COVID-19.

Because of COVID, John’s family had to cancel plans to remember John on the first anniversary of his death. There was no public funeral for Aris in 2020. Thankfully, on April 26, around 10 family members and I visited the graves of John and Aris to pray for them. Bishop Daniel Findikyan, Primate of the Eastern Diocese of the Armenian Orthodox Church in America, led us in prayer. We burned incense, laid flowers on the grave, hugged each other and cried. Then, back at the home of Rouzan Karabakhtsian, Aris’s wife and John’s mother, we shared a banquet of Armenian food as we shared stories of John and Aris.

The following day, people of various faith traditions, and some people who claim no particular faith tradition, gathered at St. Vartan’s to remember John and Aris. At the Sunday morning liturgy, I was sitting in between Rouzan and Maria, Aris’s sister and John’s aunt. I did not understand a single word in the liturgy except “Christos.” But because of my own Catholic heritage, and because I recently taught Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI’s book The Spirit of the Liturgy, I knew that each and every aspect of the liturgy aims to make present the mysteries of incarnation, death and resurrection of Jesus.

The closing of the curtain sparked in my heart the memory of the suffering and death of Christ on Good Friday. Although death is painful, the liturgy continues, reminding us that our mortality is not the end of the story. Death is a veil because it is a window to a deeper reality, one where, because of the resurrection, our love for others can be eternal. The desire for our human love to be eternal is a sign, a reflection, of the one eternal love, the whole that can unite us, in God, to our departed loved ones.

St. Paul wrote, “Neither death, nor life … nor any other creature will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord” (Romans 8:38-39). Sacred liturgy and sacred art give us a glimpse of the eternal reality that is already present, yet incomplete, in this life.

As the curtain receded at St. Vartan’s and the liturgy continued, I gazed up at the image of the Theotokos, the Mother of God, with the Christ Child on her lap. My grief over John and Aris deepened my desire for that eternal love reaching out to me from that icon.

“Death is a veil,” I thought. “Love is eternal.”

Contemplatively reading St. Bonaventure’s classic Mind’s Journey to God as I visited John several times close to this death in 2019 helped me to recognize more clearly that his bodily death was not the end. As St. Bonaventure wrote in 1259, “This actual retention on the part of memory of the things of time, past, present and future, reveals in it a reflection of eternity, which is a continuous present that transcends the passage of time.”

When death separates us from loved ones, our longing for reuniting with them is an internal light that pierces the veil of death. Grief becomes a desire to sharpen our memory. Liturgy — with its words, images, gestures, vestments and incense — engages our senses and shapes our memory, turning our mind to contemplate God and his works.

“Through the operations of memory, then,” Bonaventure wrote, “we are led to see that the human mind is an image of God, an image so present to Him and to which he is so intimate that it actually touches him, is potentially capable of holding him, and in turn may become a partaker in him.”

For all of us who have lost loved ones, the present feels incomplete without them. Family and friends of John and Aris gathered to remember them through the liturgy, precisely because our communion with God is what enables us to grasp that their life is not over. In God and through what is called the communion of saints, it is possible for John and Aris to be with us. Later that same day, we also celebrated a Catholic Mass at St. Patrick’s Cathedral in Manhattan, where John’s funeral service had been held. The absence of John and Aris — or rather their mysterious, continual presence in our personal memories and in the liturgies of the East and the West — united the hearts of those in the pews who did not know each other before the deaths of John and his father.

Over a festive meal at a restaurant, as several of us shared our favorite memories of John and his father, it felt like we were completing a puzzle, one that will never quite be complete. The more we each share of our memories of John and Aris, the more beautiful every single piece of that puzzle becomes.

With around two years to reflect on my final conversations with John, I have realized that John was so beloved because he knew how to both plan a grand evening of fun and how to be with people as they suffered. As he neared his death, he suffered physically, psychologically and even spiritually. But he never gave up his faith and hope in God.

By connecting me to others who also loved John and Aris, my grief for them paradoxically makes me feel more complete. Our shared sense of missing John and Aris has allowed us to connect deeply over that shared love, expanding my circle of love to people whom I have only met two or three times. After so much suffering and isolation, that human bond formed through tears, stories, hugging, and also singing, eating, and laughing together, felt so authentic. In allowing my deep grief to rise to the surface, I felt my painful memories were healed.

As I drove home, I gazed out at the New York City skyline, savoring memories of walking through Manhattan with John. The blue sky was clear; my heart longed to capture the sun’s radiance. When I got home to Princeton around 8:30 pm, I went to Marquand Park near my house to pray the Rosary. 

In the quiet stillness of a spring dusk in a park where I have walked hundreds of times, I felt a presence, as is someone were walking with me under the moonlight. I stared at the full moon and felt as if John was shouting, “Margarita, I’m here! I’m right here!”

Smiling, breathing slowly, I stared intently at the trees. Suddenly the beauty of their trunks, branches and leaves exhilarated me. Staring up at the moon, sometimes partially obscured by branches, nature was speaking to me, telling me that I need to trust that God’s light is guiding me even if his presence is sometimes veiled. “Even though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil, for you are with me” (Psalm 23:4).

Back at home, a feeling of lightness and ease came over me. I laid down in bed, clutching a shiny pink rosary my niece Camille brought me from Rome. My mind was not analyzing, predicting, or controlling things, but contemplating. I savored the whole weekend — grieving, rejoicing, remembering, loving, looking, listening, hugging and crying. Our celebrations brought me to a place of mental rest that is an anticipation of the fullness of time to come, a fullness that we can perceive in our hearts already. The awareness of my inability to stay in that place of comfort right now is also an anticipation of the fullness of reality to come.

Just as there is no liturgy without remembering the death of Jesus on the cross, perhaps there is no true joy without some suffering. When I sobbed at John’s hospital bedside saying goodbye to him, I never dreamed that my grief would deepen my ability to rejoice in ordinary things: a tree, the moonlight, or the clear sky. I love the liturgy more than ever because it engages all of my senses, lifts my mind to God, and brings John close to me.

Suffering and death remain a mystery to me. We do not know what may happen next in this life, but that uncertainty need not be met with fear. Knowing that life is unpredictable, and knowing that death is a veil, has taught me to express more naturally the deepest longing we all have: to give and receive love.

Our desire for love is fulfilled partially in relationships and community. But humans are mortal. Only communion with God can vanquish our fear and fulfill our desire for love. As Bonaventure wrote, “happiness, however, is possible only by the possession of the highest and ultimate end. It follows that nothing that is really desired by man except it be the Supreme Good, either as an installment of it as leading to it or else as bearing some resemblance to it.”

Death is a veil, a sign of a deeper reality of eternal life in God. Likewise, our human loves, our memory, our intellect and our will point us to God. “Memory,” Bonaventure said, “is a reflection of his eternity, intellect … postulates his truth, and the power of choice … leads to him as the Supreme Good.”

The beautiful things we perceive in nature — the sun, the moon, the trees — the desires of our hearts, and even our fear of mortality and grief for loved ones — are windows to the eternal love of God.

This article was originally published at National Catholic Register.

Moving from a Crisis of Beauty to a Culture of Reverence

The present time of crisis in higher education may tempt us away from pondering fundamental questions about the human person that are essential to understanding what education is all about. But educators should not fall prey to cultural or societal pessimism—it is our calling to acknowledge the complexities of our world and act as hopeful guides for those who look to us as moral exemplars.

To explore this challenge I invited seven fellow scholars and educators to dialogue with me on beauty and education, which led to my 2022 book, The Wounds of Beauty: Seven Dialogues on Art and Education. The themes I discuss include how beauty shaped pagan Roman and early Christian civilization; the rapport between music and beauty and the latter’s connection to other forms of knowledge; and the place of craft making in authentic living. I firmly believe teaching our students to create and to appreciate beauty is a path to cultural renewal and indispensable for their happiness.

Why should educators care about beauty when individual and societal survival are threatened?

In October 1939, just after England entered the Second World War, C. S. Lewis delivered an oration to students at Oxford in which he stated that “if men had postponed the search for knowledge and beauty until they were secure, the search would never have begun.” Published later as the essay “Learning in War-Time,” Lewis contends that “human life has always been lived on the edge of a precipice.” In the midst of suffering, beauty can help us discover the wisdom we need to suffer with joy and bury the dead with dignity.

Lewis’s comments contain a message for any educator who has been questioning what our response should be to the immense suffering of the past few years caused by the COVID pandemic and so much domestic and international political upheaval.

I long thought beauty was irrelevant to the intellectual life and our life in common. I had little understanding of how to connect my intuitive love of beauty to growth in the theological virtues of faith, hope, and love, and in the cardinal virtues of prudence, justice, temperance, and courage.

Misunderstandings about beauty have contributed to a contentious public culture and often even a religious culture that is devoid of reverence. As respect for nearly all kinds of authority has waned, respect even for our peers is hard to sustain. Lacking religious reverence and surrounded by contentious political divisions, many people today feel as I once did—incapable of experiencing lasting joy or having hope in the future.

How did I lose and then re-discover my love of beauty?

In most of my time as a student in higher education, the topic of beauty was either absent, treated as yet one more form of selfish aggrandizement, or analyzed as a variety of domination over others.

Not until I first taught a class in 2013 on the psychology, philosophy, and sociology of human happiness did I began to reconsider my understanding of the connection between beauty, the intellectual life, and the theological and human virtues. As a part of that class at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, I took a test that ranked my character strengths. I was unsurprised when I scored high on rationality and analytical thinking. But I was dismayed that I scored lowest on appreciation of beauty.

How could that be? I love beautiful sunsets. I enjoy art museums. Singing is one of the main ways that I praise God.

Maybe my honest responses to the test reflected decades of pursuing more and more achievements. The test forced me to say how I actually spent my time, not necessarily how I desired to spend my time. Students taking my class described elevated stress levels and a lack of meaning in life. I worried that my teaching and writing might pass on my analytical skills but would not help my students find their way to beauty.

The test instructed us that focusing on our strengths could increase our happiness. But I knew that my happiness, or that of my students, would not grow simply by virtue of our becoming ever more analytical. I longed to bring a more holistic approach to happiness into my teaching, one which included opening myself more to the joy of experiencing beauty.

Around the same time, I embarked on a new line of research on resilience and suffering. Doing in-depth interviews with young people across the United States, I heard them describe experiences of beauty in the midst of suffering that seemed to provide much more than a coping mechanism for pain. One poignant example was the story of a young man named Jason struggling with addiction to heroin. Although he only saw chaos inside himself and thought about taking his own life, he had felt a kind of peace while being immersed in a beautiful sunset that gave him hope that some kind of meaningful order just might exist outside himself.

At the time I was doing that project, I was living as a resident faculty fellow in one of Yale’s residential colleges. The more students I got to know outside of the traditional classroom, the more I realized that one commonality behind the diverse cultural, religious, and class backgrounds of students was an existential struggle and deep desire for beauty and transcendence that was not being fed.

Too many people are like I was once: caught in the dilemma of loving either reason or beauty—but never both. Many do not know where to go for deep experiences of beauty; even fewer understand that the life of virtue is abundantly beautiful. I longed to share with students how experiencing beauty can lead to moments of self-transcendence, in which we realize that we are not alone in this world and that we did not create ourselves. When we see the world around us as a gift, new possibilities are always on the horizon.

As Pope Benedict XVI argues in A Reason Open to God (2013), a proper understanding of rationality goes beyond analytical thinking to include the openness to mystery so often experienced by encountering beauty. Even for people—like Jason—who had never been involved with a community of faith, encountering beauty helped them see that there must be a creator of the world, and that therefore they are not alone in their suffering. Students in higher education often express a deep compassion for the vulnerable; I wanted them to see that beauty is essential to all human lives, no matter how broken.

Awareness of a transcendent being increases our capacity for joy, even in the midst of suffering. In a 2002 address entitled “The Feeling of Things, the Contemplation of Beauty,” then-Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger explains how the ancient Greek philosophers understood this relationship between beauty and pain. Plato, for example, thought that encountering beauty attracts us to something other than ourselves, something that has retained its perfection. Encountering beauty makes us restless to seek out the source of that beauty. That longing, in a sense, causes us to suffer. “In a Platonic sense,” Ratzinger comments, “we could say that the arrow of nostalgia pierces man, wounds him and in this way gives him wings, lifts him up towards the transcendent.” Continuing with the metaphor, he states, “The encounter with the beautiful can become the wound of the arrow that strikes the heart.”

The title of my book, The Wounds of Beauty, is taken from these words. Physical or psychological sufferings point to deep wounds in our soul, and it is here that beauty meets us, offering transcendence. The wounds of beauty do not erase pain and loss but instead show us their significance and affirm the meaningfulness of our lives.

There are thousands of people just like me, my students, and the people I encountered in my research on resilience who are desperate for this encounter with something sacred. Too often we are fed the junk food of entertainment, not the nourishing food of true beauty.

Too often during my educational experiences, I heard professors and students say that truth and beauty are merely aspects of ideology or power. But my interviews with people who had endured long suffering, and my work with students of various backgrounds, has shown me time and again that experiences of beauty in the midst of suffering can happen to anyone. Hence Benedict XVI’s insistence that “a pressing need of our time” is the rediscovery of beauty as a form of knowledge, as an encounter with reality.

I have spent a lifetime running away from suffering, only to fall back on my knees countless times begging for relief from my own self-inflicted wounds of pride. Rather than wallowing in self-pity for my analytical delusions of perfection that fail to correspond to the complexity of human life, I have been led to fall in love time and again with the beauty of nature and great works of architecture, art, and music.

Perhaps it is only human that we never overcome the fear of suffering. But often embracing the reality of my imperfections and accepting the inevitability of somehuman suffering has led me out of a place of darkness. The wounds of suffering thus have become for me an opening to encounter a transcendent reality.

In a time of crisis, the message that beauty is not the opposite of suffering and that beauty can lead us to the truth becomes more important than ever. Nurturing our love of beauty is part of becoming whole. An education that neglects beauty can never be holistic.

Can Beauty Help Education Transcend Ideology?

Contemporary movements in education that see truth as nothing but an ideological weapon or a form of power have contributed to a hopelessness and divisiveness in our culture. One key idea in my book The Love of Learning is that the neglect of transcendence, as seen in the work of influential figures such as John Dewey and Paulo Freire, results in equating reason with ideology.

In contrast, thinkers like Jacques Maritain and Luigi Giussani both argue that humans long for a transcendent source of beauty that opens us to mystery. An education where the creativity behind art, music, architecture, and scientific discovery is connected to reverence for creation and for other human beings builds a culture of joy and true solidarity. Recovering beauty as central to education would help fill the void in people’s hearts, reform educational institutions, and lead to stronger social unity.

We learn from moral exemplars. We learn through stories. We learn from questions and answers in dialogue with other scholars and our own minds. In order to integrate beauty into our lives, classrooms and mentoring, all educators should ponder questions such as these and discuss them with each other and with our students:

·      Is it possible to have more time for beauty in a hyper-competitive educational system?

·      If experiencing beauty is not subject to quantitative measurement, does the impact of beauty on education then escape all forms of objective evaluation?

·      If beauty is a mystery, does that mean it cannot be understood, studied, taught, learned?

·      Is experiencing beauty purely contemplative or do we have to create beautiful things in order to really experience beauty?

·      What are some common contemporary misunderstandings about beauty?

·      How is beauty related to truth?

·      Is beauty objective?

·      Does beauty speak for itself or does understanding beauty require higher-order philosophical or theological principles?

·      Is beauty different from mathematics and science or somehow related to them?

·      Why is beauty important to counteract abstractions about truth and goodness?

Recovering the Vocation to Teach

The best teachers love their subjects and are inspired to share what they have learned to mentor the next generation. Students are also longing for mentors who pursue beauty and wisdom, and who practice creativity in their own callings.

The vocation to teach includes leading others to the truth, helping them find the sacred in experiences of beauty, living with joy, entering deeply into leisure, and forming a coherent identity.

If we take some time to educate our own attraction to the beautiful, we will expand our awareness of the many gifts of everyday life that we often take for granted, thereby living every moment with a greater sense of vocation. Our intuitive love of beauty can and should be formed, purified, and connected to our vocations to teach. Beauty can purify our minds and hearts for God and help us to serve others. Experiencing beauty is fundamental to education because it is fundamental to being human.

References

Benedict XVI. A Reason Open to God: On Universities, Education, and Culture. Washington, DC: The Catholic University of America Press, 2013.

Lewis, C. S. “Learning in War-Time.” Sermon given at the Church of Saint Mary the Virgin, Oxford University, October 22, 1939. In The Weight of Glory. New York: HarperOne, 2001.

Mooney, Margarita A. The Love of Learning: Seven Dialogues on the Liberal Arts. Providence, RI: Cluny Media, 2021.

______. “Narratives, Religion, and Traumatic Life Events Among Young Adults.” Social Thought and Research, Volume 33 (2014).

Mooney Suarez, Margarita. The Wounds of Beauty: Seven Dialogues on Art and Education. Providence, RI: Cluny Media, 2022.

______. “A Crisis of Beauty” (March 25, 2020). Available at https://margaritamooneysuarez.com/2020/03/a-crisis-of-beauty/

______. “Why Choose Mystery Over Ideology?” Comment (October 15, 2021). Available at https://comment.org/why-choose-mystery-over-ideology/

Ratzinger, Joseph. “The Feeling of Things, the Contemplation of Beauty.” Message to the Communion and Liberation Meeting at Rimini (August 24, 2002). Available @ https://www.vatican.va/roman_curia/congregations/cfaith/documents/rc_con_cfaith_doc_20020824_ratzinger-cl-rimini_en.html

This article is an adaptation of Margarita Mooney Clayton’s 2022 book The Wounds of Beauty, published by Cluny Media, which explores the ideas of suffering, beauty, and mystery, and their contributions to education.