Why this picture? I don't know. I just like it. It's a picture of a nice day.
After something of a hiatus, during which my mother had surgery and I spent two weeks caring for her and also had some book reviewing and other writing projects to finish . . . I'm back. Specifically, I'm back to thinking about Charlotte Mason's 20 Principles of education.
To access our discussions of Principles 1-15, click the links in the 20 Principles directory in the blog sidebar.
Suffice it to say here that, again, what's happening in the unfolding of these educational principles is that we are building a coherent edifice of ideas whose foundation is the principle of the child as a human person: right now, as he is, made by God, not needing his humanity, his reason, his intellect, his personhood, to be added onto in any way by us, his parents.
Suffice it also to say here that, again, this foundational idea is a wholly Catholic idea. It doesn't need to be amended or "made Catholic" somehow. It's deeply rooted in Thomas Aquinas's thought about our personhood, our status as a particular kind of creature before God who made us. Our likeness to God's own image locates itself most fully in the intellect which He has given us: the "light" of our minds, as Thomas has it, which both reflects and seeks its divine Source.
Any "action" of that light, Thomas says, depends on God's help to make that action. No "movement" is achieved without some "movement" by the Prime Mover, who is God. If we perceive truth of any order – whether it's the truth that God exists, the truth that gravity makes things fall down, the truth that jealousy and ambition destroy a person's soul, or the truth that two and two make four – it is because our minds have moved in cooperation with God's own movement, to shed some light on something.
In other words, there is no such thing as thinking outside God, any more than there is such a thing as existing outside God. To perceive something untrue is simply not to have perceived at all: it's a nothingness, a negative, an absence of perception. To borrow the famous phrase from the prophet Isaiah, it is to continue to walk in darkness.
This is why, incidentally, a Catholic may contemplate something without having to "relate it to Catholicism." It's enough to write an essay about the Aeneid in which you assert that Aeneas founds Rome. The homeschooled Catholic high school student does not need to add (though let me tell you, too many of them do), "And the Catholic Church is true." It's Catholic enough just to say, "According to Virgil in the Aeneid, Aeneas is the founder of Rome." Why is it Catholic enough? It's Catholic enough because it's true. If you write that, you've said something true, and therefore Catholic.
It also (incidentally) doesn't matter to your reading of Shakespeare whether he was actually a Catholic or not. Ask me what I think constitutes the most boring possible essay about a Shakespeare play? The essay whose object is to prove that there's some secret code in the play that settles once and for all the nature of Shakespeare's private religious belief. Sorry, boring. Boring and irrelevant and gossipy. It's the literary equivalent of speculating about whether the person in the next pew really believes in the Real Presence, based on whether they receive Communion on the tongue or in the hand. What matters, meanwhile, what is at stake in a Shakespeare play – assuming that one understands literature as writing in which something essential is at stake – is what it says about human beings and how they operate in the universe in which they have been set. It is Catholic to talk about this kind of thing, because what you are talking about when you talk about it is what's true.
Possibly I digress. But I think it's important to note that what is true – which, after all, is the ultimate orientation of a child's education – is not a matter of Catholic labeling. You don't make a math problem more true by having it be about Sister Mary Monarda and her rosary beads. Nor is truth synonymous with fact. As the Catholic historian John Lukacs has noted, growing up in Communist Hungary taught him that all the facts in the world don't necessarily add up to something true. Statistics may not lie, exactly – but it's certainly possible to misrepresent them, which is a lie. This is why the most fundamental objective of a child's education is not simply to present him with "the good, the beautiful, and the true," but to help him nurture his faculty for discerning what is good, beautiful, and true. Here Sister Mary Monarda and her rosary beads won't help you much, unless she's praying for you. In fact, she might get in the way. If you teach your child that a picture is only pretty if Sister Mary Monarda is in it, then your child's habit will be to look for Sister Mary Monarda in any picture, and if he doesn't see her, to reject the picture categorically as worthless, even if it's a picture of Niagra Falls or the Taj Mahal or sunrise over Grand Teton. No Sister Mary Monarda? No beauty. Too bad, Grand Teton. By yourself, without Sister Mary Monarda, you cannot possibly be beautiful.
Why am I going on about all this? Well, partially, as I say, I digress. I digress in order to take on, as a thing to tilt at, an anxiety that seems to pervade Catholic homeschooling circles, a suspicion of anything not labeled "Catholic," including Charlotte Mason herself. I'm tilting at this anxiety because I think it represents a serious diminution of how we might understand truth: it's a mental box we confine ourselves to, which paradoxically diminishes our capacity to apprehend goodness, beauty, and truth, the very transcendentals we like to say we're all about. It leads us to say things like, "I mean, the Taj Mahal is nice, but isn't there a Catholic Taj Mahal?" Which, yes, on the one hand, the world is filled with breathtaking Catholic cathedrals . . . but they're not the Taj Mahal. They're not really even analogous to the Taj Mahal. Of course we find our own cathedrals beautiful. We can also, as Catholics, look at the Taj Mahal and discern, in its balance, proportions, and symmetry, an expression of the essential goodness of God, immanent in His creation even as He transcends it. It's not like there's Muslim beauty and then Catholic beauty, and we're only allowed to recognize the Catholic kind. God is God; beauty is beauty; if there is beauty, our God, the only God, the Maker of all things, is present in it. To recognize the hand of our God in all beauty, everywhere in His creation, is central to the abundant life Christ wishes for us. To train ourselves to recognize only certain, specific, approved instances of beauty is to reject that abundance in favor of impoverishment. This is not something I want for myself, or my children, or any other of my brothers and sisters in Christ.
I'm also on about this because with Charlotte Mason's Principle 16, we make something of a turn. We've spent fifteen principles establishing the humanity of the child, the aliveness of his mind, and the elements that constitute his education, in terms of both instrument and method. Now we're starting to get at the ultimate objectives of this education, the levels of formation which are the goals of these instruments and methods.
What does Principle 16 say?
There are two guides to moral and intellectual self-management to offer to children, which we may call 'the way of the will' and 'the way of the reason.' (source)
Subsequent principles will interrogate these two "ways," that of will and that of reason. But today I am interested in the phrase "moral and intellectual self-management," because it occurs to me that not only is this the end goal of a Charlotte Mason education, it's also really what I've been talking about here. It is the direction in which my digressions above have been tending.
What do we mean by "moral and intellectual self-management?"
Charlotte Mason closes Chapter 7 of Volume 6: Towards a Philosophy of Education – the chapter dedicated to "making use of mind" – by invoking Plato's assertion that "knowledge is virtue." (you can read the final paragraph of that chapter here, though you might need to scroll up a bit) She qualifies Plato by adding that what she really means here is "knowledge informed by religion." A Catholic might say, "knowledge mediated through a well-formed conscience" – I think that is essentially what she means, and certainly a valid way for us to understand the equation of knowledge and virtue. In other words, being equipped to discern what is true is the essence of virtue. You can't think and speak and act in the service of truth if you don't know what it is, or how to recognize it when you see it. You can't even know yourself very well, your virtues, your vices, without some illuminating language and imagery by which to navigate examinations of your conscience.
Here – and I believe this generally to be true – moral and intellectual aren't meant to be understood as separate categories. How, really, do you separate the mind from the soul? We're talking about the "light" that animates us; we do believe, after all, that we are more than the sum of the chemical processes that happen in our physical brains, that what makes us us, not just in our faith life but in all our thoughts, our feelings, our personalities, our impulses, our questions, our attempts to make meaning, is something spiritual in its essence. You can't compartmentalize faith from all the rest of it, and certainly not from reason, as St. John Paul II articulates exhaustively in his encyclical Fides et Ratio. This is why, among other things, we speak of "the moral imagination," which is ordered toward visualizing what is true, in order to act truly.
Ultimately, that is what Principle 16 is going to be about, with its subsequent unpackings: the development of the moral imagination. In addition to "moral and intellectual," that phrase "self-management" is also crucial. The objective of education, the end to which all these other principles are ordered, is that the student, at the end of his childhood journey, poised to step into adulthood, no longer depends on his parents to tell him what to do. His travels through education represent a trajectory that ends in adult autonomy – not the isolated radical autonomy of a character out of Ayn Rand, but the kind of autonomy that leads out of the childhood bedroom and the parental basement to some other place where the person, grown to adulthood, can manage himself to a reasonable degree without self-destructing, because he has developed the imaginative capacity not simply to parrot the rules of right-vs.-wrong, but to imagine both what doing right looks like (with its consequences) and what doing wrong looks like (with its consequences), and to engage that capacity in making the decisions that carry him through each day.
This is why his education has to be about more than finding Sister Mary Monarda in every picture. Sister Mary Monarda won't be in every picture. Sister Mary Monarda can't be everywhere. But God can, and He will. He will be there, to be turned toward. Moral and intellectual self-management depends on our being able to recognize Him, even when all the familiar labels are absent, and to perceive His way when the signposts are down. That's the why behind living books, art and music, even those that don't strike us as obviously "Catholic" in nature. It's the why behind narration: to begin to respond and assimilate with our own minds, instead of being told what to think, and how. It's the why behind nature study, behind all of it. It's why we do these things as Catholics, rather than simply "doing Catholic things."
The world our children will inhabit will not be a CatholicWorld(TM). But it will be God's world. And like Peter and Susan, Edmund and Lucy, when their time comes to leave Narnia, never to return, our children will have received, through their education, their vision of Aslan, so that wherever they meet him in their journeys, wherever they go, they will recognize Him and walk toward His light.
***
In hindsight it occurs to me that I should have been talking about Narnia early in this piece, but that's why finished essays are finished essays and blog posts are blog posts. Anyway, reading back from my final paragraph, I see that I might have spun out what the Pevensie children experience in Narnia – that whole mythological world with its frankly magical elements – as the preparation of their moral imaginations for life in the world of adult reality. But I didn't do that, at least in this blog post. I just made notes for revision, in case I ever DO want to write anything like that.
But the point really does remain: People do not learn to be saints simply by reading about saints. People do not learn to act rightly simply by reading definitions of right and wrong. Life is not a catechism bee. Education should prepare people for something more than a catechism bee. Education really is about the moral imagination – "moral and intellectual self-management" – which means confronting, imaginatively, images of ourselves that tell us the truth about ourselves, as well as about the world, the cosmos, and God. Why? Because we have to be ourselves in the world. And while we will find some of our potential in the stories of the saints, we will also find some of our potential in King Lear, as well we should. The more we recognize about ourselves, the more, potentially, we recognize about God and our need for Him . . . particularly if all our imaginative experiences are framed and crowned by our participation in the Mass and the Sacraments, by prayer and sacred scripture.
See also: my essay "Children's Books and the Christian Story"