‘Tis the season for commencements

by Andrew Seeley

‘Tis the season for commencements: collegiate, high school, elementary school, even kindergarten. Some are silly, some cute, some respectful, some tedious, some beautiful. On Saturday, I was blessed to attend one which, more than anything, was deeply joyful. The school was St. Augustine’s Academy in Ventura, California, which combined high school graduation with eighth grade promotion. From the hugs given by seniors to the eighth graders as they symbolically handed them their certificates to the evident affection and pride expressed by graduates, teachers and administrators, I couldn’t help but wish that I could say to a relativistic world, “This is all we want for you – love God, strive for goodness, excellence and self-control, sprinkle charity over all, and you can have joy!” When I returned home, I read this reflection of Pope Benedict’s, inspired by the daily reading from the Acts of the Apostles ("There was great joy in that city."):

"We are deeply impressed again and again by this expression, which in essence communicates a sense of hope, as if saying: It is possible! It is possible for humanity to know true joy, because wherever the Gospel arrives, life flourishes, just as an arid terrain that, irrigated by rain, is immediately verdant."

The first senior address expressed it all. Delivered by a beautiful, natural, confident young woman, in whose face shone mirth and gladness as she spoke wisely, seriously, and, above all, joyfully, her speech moved us deeply. The perfect blend of heart and head spoke more powerfully than any possible advertisement for the intellectual and moral strength of the school community in which she was nurtured.

Why don’t we as a society turn to such models, desiring to discover the secret of their success so that it might be shared with the young throughout the land? Alas, such models are too rare; many have never even heard that this is possible, so they never look. Others might hear people like me shouting, “Here is the real deal!” But not experiencing it for themselves, their impoverished imaginations twist all they hear and return our offer with sneering and mockery. Finally, the daunting commitment to the life of faith and discipline that makes such joy possible makes many turn away.

Presenting What is Beautiful: The Joyful Duty of Catholic Education

by Andrew Seeley

“Too late have I loved Thee, O Beauty, ever ancient, ever new!” St. Augustine was in his forties by the time he penned this personal lament. As readers of the Confessions know (and the Confessions has been a universal must-read for 1600 years), Augustine wasted himself for 30 years before he finally embraced the Lord in the greatest conversion story ever told. Throughout his retrospective, he refers to beauty, the need for beauty, the search for beauty. His wanderings away from the faith of his mother were intimately bound up with a search for beauty. He did not find beauty in his catechesis, nor in his early education, so he sought it in the wild passions of love and friendship. Eventually, Augustine found the Lord by realizing in very painful ways that other beauties disappointed when they were mistaken for real Beauty.

In his praise of the Lord, St. Augustine connects love and Beauty, for they are correlatives. Love is aroused by what is beautiful, beauty inspires love. We need to be inspired by what is truly beautiful, to be passionate about what is lovely. And to enjoy in the objects of natural affection a suggestion, a reflection of the Beauty that never passes.

Our nation’s Puritanical past might lead us to think that to be religious is to deny ourselves what is beautiful, but the opposite is true. The Danish movie, Babette’s Feast, provides a parable about a small fishing village that has driven out all that is beautiful in life in its misguided following of Christianity. The loss of beauty leads to a loss of joy and friendship. The humble cook, who is really a refugee French chef, wins a lottery fortune and uses it to prepare a sumptuous feast to celebrate the founder of the community. In the course of the feast, the village is re-awakened, re-evangelized and re-united.

Catholic schools have a joyful duty to present what is beautiful to their students. At the center of the school, the chapel and all religious services should present a feast for the eyes, the ears, the mind and the heart. Classrooms and hallways should be tastefully decorated; students will imbibe fine works of art over the course of their years at a school. Tasteful, rich, clever visual presentations should be an important factor when considering textbook series.

Beauty has an important place in the central activity of teaching and learning. Learning certainly requires discipline, but deep down it is a feast for the mind and heart. An ancient expression describing what it means to be beautiful is, “What pleases merely by being seen.” What is beautiful does not have to be possessed, consumed to please us; merely a look is sufficient to delight us. When we hear this, we immediately think of paintings, faces, the visible things seen by the eyes. But in a more profound sense, what pleases the mind by itself, without reference to possessing something, is truly beautiful.

Lord of the Rings and Christian Education: Developing the Human Person

by Andrew Seeley

For classical educators, developing the human person is the primary goal, and the cultural treasures of the past are the principal means to that goal. Making the thoughts, words, stories and beauty of Christian civilization a living part of students gives them standards and ideals that direct their maturation into adults who help shape their world.

JRR Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings epic, wonderful in so many ways, also resonates with the spirit of classical education. In a surprising statement at the end of the story, Gandalf, the wizard who has guided and protected the hobbits, speaks of their adventures as a kind of education:

I am not coming to the Shire. You must settle its affairs yourselves; that is what you have been trained for. Do you not yet understand?

Without realizing it, the four hobbits, three of them relatively young, have been prepared to become leaders of their society.

At the beginning of the story, Sam, Merry and Pippin are much like their fellow hobbits of the Shire – decent folk but almost completely unaware of anything outside their little world. Most hobbits were not only unaware, but proudly so. Sam’s father was suspicious of the fact that Sam had learned to read: “Mr. Bilbo has learned him his letters—meaning no harm, mark you, and I hope no harm will come of it.” He had no idea why Sam left, and no interest in his tale once he returned. Tolkien, like Gandalf, admired many of the virtues that developed in Shire-life, but also deeply believed that as long as they remained in their uncultured state, they remained small-minded, small-souled and self-satisfied. Those hobbits attracted to Bilbo’s stories and poems of Elves and dragons, Frodo in particular, knew that the wider world held beauties (and dangers) vastly greater than anything that had ever occurred in the Shire. And they wanted to come to know that world.

Avatar: Encountering Non-Catholic Cultures

by Andrew Seeley

The box office records set by James Cameron’s movie, Avatar, tell me that I was not alone in finding the movie’s visual presentation breathtaking. The 3D screen immersed me in the beauty and variety and power of Cameron’s imagined nature and machine. Along with leading character, Jake Sully, I re-discovered the delight of walking and running and got a taste of the joy of jumping and swinging and flying.

Avatar also attempted to satisfy another fundamental urge, that of encountering, exploring, and even becoming a part of an alien culture. Through his avatar, Jake gets to live the life of the Na’vi, fierce people native to the planet Pandora. Having come to destroy their way of life, he is surprised to experience a nobility, a sense of community, and an awareness of the natural that he has never known.

Avatar’s appreciative presentation of a non-Christian culture is in many ways very Christian. At Pentecost, the inspired Apostles proclaimed the praises of God’s saving work to Jews and God-fearing Gentiles from around the known world. Though many of them understood Hebrew or Aramaic, the listeners marveled to hear the proclamation in each of their native languages. This was the beginning of the “Catholic” Church, a Church which incorporates the many peoples of the Earth into one great united Body of Christ.

The Pentecost story exemplifies the Church’s perennial attitude toward human cultures. Blessed John Henry Newman explained why the Church has welcomed into her liturgy and teaching much that she has found in the cultures which she has encountered through the ages:

…We prefer to say, and we think that Scripture bears us out in saying, that from the beginning the Moral Governor of the world has scattered the seeds of truth far and wide over its extent; that these have variously taken root, and grown as in the wilderness, wild plants indeed but living…The philosophies and religions of men have their life in certain true ideas, though they are not directly divine. [On the Development of Christian Doctrine]

Liberal Education: The Institute for Catholic Liberal Education

by Andrew Seeley

"Every scribe who has been trained for the kingdom of heaven is like a master of a house, who brings out of his treasure what is new and what is old." 

Readers of The Imaginative Conservative must frequently be tempted to throw up their hands in despair over the state of education today. How can we reinvigorate our culture with a sense of what is True, Beautiful and Good when our schools seem determined to douse the light of wonder that is natural to young people? It kills me everytime I see a bright, chatty kid I met during his little league years come out of junior high school seemingly without a spark of interest in life. The Left wants to undermine any connection of the young to our traditions; the Right wants to test them into conformity with the existing corporate and bureaucratic system. Very few place any importance on developing the hearts and minds of the young by connecting them to riches of our Western tradition.

Christopher Dawson saw the problem facing Western civilization through the loss of commitment to liberal education. Yet he also saw a great hope for change through developments in the Catholic parochial system, as he pointed out in The Crisis of Western Education.

...As education reaches a certain point of development, it opens up new and wider cultural horizons. It ceases to be a utilitarian parochial effort for the maintenance of a minimum standard of religious instruction and becomes the gateway to the wider kingdom of Catholic culture which has two thousand years of tradition behind it and is literally world-wide in its extent and scope.

The Catholic Church embraced classical education in the early Middle Ages, incorporating it into monastic, ecclesiastical and, eventually, secular life. In one form or another, from the Benedictine monasteries to the medieval universities to the Jesuit’s Ratio Studiorum, Liberal Education has traditionally been the core of Catholic education. The goals of classical education – perfecting the natural powers of the mind while embracing and developing a tradition – coalesced perfectly with the incarnational, traditional and pilgrimmatic understanding of Christian life.

Liberal Education occurs within a tradition of learning and culture. The Greeks learned Homer and the poets, the laws and the histories. These contained the best and most beautiful accounts of the good, the beautiful and the true. Becoming conversant with these texts made the young accustomed to the most noble and challenging of ideas; he became a fellow in the highest society, one fit at some level to listen to, question, and even develop these great men.

Teaching Virtue: The Dot and the Line

by Andrew Seeley

In the cultural wasteland of the '70s, where peace and love had degenerated into sex, drugs and rock ‘n roll, precious few lights beckoned to youth who met license, pornography, and drugs everywhere. Yet Providence did not wholly abandon us. From time to time, I remember some of those suggestions of a more beautiful life that eventually led me to cry for grace. Thanks to today’s technology, I can often quickly find books or music or movies that I think had a salvific influence on me and share them with my own children.

Recently I re-discovered one of those, a 1965 Chuck Jones movie short called “The Dot and the Line: A Romance in Lower Mathematics.” Not only do I still enjoy it, but I have begun to use it for workshops with Catholic educators to help them understand a concept key to Catholic education: virtue.

The animated version of an original Norton Juster tale features a straight Line in love with a Dot. The Dot has no interest in the boring, stiff Line, preferring the company of a jazzy, fun-loving Squiggle. The Line remains in love, rejecting the advice of his fellow-lines to settle down with a nice sensible straight line. After day-dreaming himself into sickness, the Line finally decides he has to change himself in order to win the Dot’s affections. Months of effort are rewarded when he finally learns to form an angle. Refusing to “squander his talents” by following the chaotic lifestyle of the Squiggle, the Line trains himself to form the most elaborate and beautiful of geometric figures, a talent that allows him to express the “inner, passionate me.”