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.

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.