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.

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.