The Poetic Body of the Benedictine Charism

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

He continues thus:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[2] Ibid., 216.

[3] Ibid., 113.

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

[5] Ibid.

[6] Ibid., 74.

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

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

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

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

Tradition and Authority in Luigi Giussani’s Educational Method

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

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

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

Embodying a Tradition

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

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

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

The Integration of Living and Knowing

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

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

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

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

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

The Risk

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

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

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

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

Person-Centered Education

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

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

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

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

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

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

This article was originally published online by Public Discourse.