In our consideration of Charlotte Mason's Principle 17, to do with "the Way of the Will," we noted that this "way" represents an extension or development of the idea of "moral and intellectual self-management," which is the substance of Principle 16. I suppose it's partially accurate to say that "The Way of the Will" has chiefly to do with the "moral" aspect of "moral and intellectual self-management," which is to say: it's about impulse control. It's about that fundamental dichotomy between what we want and what is right, and helping children to grow in both discernment of the difference between the two and the capacity to choose well. Clearly, even as I write this, I can see, however, that this question of the will isn't merely moral. Inescapably, it's part of intellectual development as well.
Here, as you can see, we're not departing from Thomas Aquinas, who has been our touchstone as Catholic thinkers about Charlotte Mason's philosophy. While Thomas asserts that human beings are given desires, or appetites, that are essentially ordered toward a hunger for God, it's still true that an appetite or desire can be disordered, or that we can mistake the immediate material object that answers the appetite – a new dress, a new house, a fine dinner, attention, success, even human love – for the ultimate end of our desires. Implicit in "The Way of the Will" is the necessity of learning to discern what it is we really want – which as Thomas says is knowledge of God: not merely intellectual knowledge, as in knowing about God, but knowledge closer in kind to the biblical "knowing" of intimate love. So even when we talk about "knowledge" or "the intellect," we're really talking about something that encompasses the whole person: not just the abstract-reasoning part of the mind, but its emotional and sensory affects.
It's probably not even accurate, now that I think about it, to talk in terms of "I want" vs. "I will," though that's useful language to use with our children. Really, though, the dichotomy is more between "what I think I want" and "what I REALLY want," which again is ultimately to know God. The thing I must learn to choose, to train my will toward, is that thing I REALLY want: the desire and following action that puts me in the way of knowing God. All the complexity of the human being is engaged in this "knowing," and this might be useful to keep in mind as we consider "The Way of Reason."
This "Way of Reason" forms the central concern of Principle 18:
We teach children, too, not to 'lean (too confidently) to their own understanding'; because the function of reason is to give logical demonstration (a) of mathematical truth, (b) of an initial idea, accepted by the will. In the former case, reason is, practically, an infallible guide, but in the latter, it is not always a safe one; for, whether that idea be right or wrong, reason will confirm it by irrefragable proofs. (source)
As the accompanying annotation explains, what is meant here is that human reason is good, but not infallible. Like the appetites, it can lose touch with its God-given orientation, which is to seek knowledge of Him. Rather than illuminating our vision, human reason can become its own closed circuit, an echo chamber. In other words, you can use your reason to solve a math problem correctly – good! But you can also use the same faculty to convince yourself of just about anything. Argue with yourself, and you'll always win. By means of your own reason, you can reframe anything you read or hear so that it says not what it says, but what you hear it saying. Our rationality is a gift, but it can be a trap, too.
On the simplest level, this section of Volume 6: Towards a Philosophy of Education might be read as a caution against intellectual arrogance, an assertion that humility, if not downright mistrust of one's own capacity for reason, were alone the answer to the trap of reason. But that's not what Thomas would say, and I don't think it's really what Charlotte Mason is saying here. At least, it's only a small facet of what she's saying.
She provides, first of all, the example of Macbeth, returning from victory in battle and encountering the three witches who plant in his mind the idea of being king. All they have to do is greet him by that name – after first calling him Thane of Glamis, which he is, then Thane of Cawdor, which he isn't yet, but shortly becomes. He doesn't have to be made king to conclude, from this series of events, that logically he must be king. If there's a one, and a two, there must be a three, says his reason, leading him down the path to murder, alienation, and ultimate destruction. As Charlotte Mason notes:
The change is sudden and complete, and, we may believe, reason justified him at every point. But reason did not begin it. The will played upon by ambition had already admitted the notion of towering greatness or ever the 'weird Sisters' gave shape to his desire. Had it not been for this countenance afforded by the will, the forecasts of fate would have influenced his conduct no more then they did that of Banquo.
Here is the connection with the previous principle (because as we know by now, they're all connected): an ordered will, based on discernment of desires, is meant to keep the reason in check. Banquo, ordered and virtuous, simply marvels at the "weird sisters," doubting even their reality. To be habituated to choosing rightly – "The Way of the Will" – means to have cultivated one's desire for what is good to such an extent that the voices of evil seem not only wrong but unreal. What they have to say, describing unreal things, holds no enticement for the person whose will is well-ordered.
I suppose there's an element of circularity in all this, though, since discernment of one's desires, like any discernment, entails the use of reason. How do you think to yourself, "This is what I think I want, but that is what I truly want," without engaging your reason? But again, we might say that an ordered will is one which has been habituated to doing what it right, not necessarily what is desired by the appetite – which is another way of saying that habit-training matters, and that it entails a lot more than just taking out the garbage when asked. It entails a lot more than "right-away obedience," because as we noted in our previous discussion, "The Way of the Will" is about the exercise of free will to choose to do and desire what is right. It's not just doing the right thing over and over. It's actively choosing the right thing that is the habit to cultivate, which is a lot harder than just training somebody to jump when you say jump.
It is that desire for what is right that might have checked Macbeth in his moral plummet. Macbeth's tragedy, though, is the outgrowth of the echo chamber in his own mind. When the king's men appear, at the witches' disappearing, to name Macbeth Thane of Cawdor, the difference in Banquo's and Macbeth's responses is interesting. Banquo says, "What, can the devil speak true?" He has recognized precisely the source of the message Macbeth has received. Macbeth's response, on the other hand, is revealing: "The Thane of Cawdor lives. Why do you dress me in borrowed robes?" He says, in other words, "How can this make sense?" –– a question for which Angus and Rosse provide a ready answer. Banquo, from his own moral position, is prepared not to give the witches' prophecy the time of day. Having recognized it as evil, he has no reason to fall into the train of its logic. Macbeth, on the other hand, has had his disordered desires played upon, and therefore is primed to see things fall into place just as the witches have decreed. The most compelling voice in his world, meanwhile, after the witches, is that of his wife, who says, oddly enough, exactly what his own thoughts have been intimating to him, those things that only the witches heretofore have spoken aloud to him.
When you find yourself saying, admiringly, of someone, that he says what nobody else will say, that's a sign that you ought to check first yourself, then what the other person is actually saying. Why is it that Lady Macbeth will say what nobody else will say? Because Lady Macbeth, eaten up with power-hunger herself, is willing to say what no decent person would say – and what she says resonates with Macbeth precisely because her words mirror his darkest, least-decent thoughts. She gives him permission first to think them, then to act on them, and he never seriously calls that permission, his own thoughts or hers, into question. He simply falls in with what he has reasoned to be his destiny, a destiny which leads to destruction for them both.
Of course, as Charlotte Mason notes, and as we already know from Thomas Aquinas, human reason in itself is not "malign." "We know," she says, "how Florence Nightingale received, welcomed, reasoned out the notion of pity which obsessed her." Reason is the necessary accompaniment to our inchoate appetites – in Florence Nightingale's case, the rightly-ordered appetite for giving comfort to the suffering, encapsulated in the word pity. She might have been moved by that proper appetite, that good feeling, but reason is what moved her appetite into good action. Reason, Charlotte Mason notes, enables not only the idea but its execution; it is the process of all human invention. It is, to invoke Thomas Aquinas again, that way in which we are most like God, in our making and doing – at least potentially. On the other hand, "You shall be like God," says . . . somebody, at the dawn of human history. And his reasoning is not exactly wrong. It's just exactly right enough – that thing nobody else would have said – to set all the world's evil in motion.
But again, "The Way of Reason" sheds additional light on "The Way of the Will," in suggesting that the cultivation of the will is not, after all, merely about impulse control. If we understand "The Way of the Will" further as the habituation of the desire for what is right (ultimately to know God), then we can understand the proper ordering of human reason to involve the development of a coherent vision for doing what is right. I think we might further understand that the light of reason is meant to illuminate the darker corners of ourselves, so that we can confront whatever in us is fallen and disordered, recognize and name it, rule against it, to the best of our ability, with the help of God's grace in the sacraments and in our own pursuit of moral understanding through the study of the scriptures and the Church's thought, but also through literature, history, and all the other branches of knowledge that widen our vision of what is true. Thus educated, we're better placed to interrogate that voice that says what nobody else will say. Is that voice, whoever it belongs to, saying something true? Or is it simply saying something – that we will be like God – that our worst selves would like to be true?
Again, it becomes almost impossible to separate the moral from the intellectual aspects of self-management, as indeed I think it's meant to be. Our intellect doesn't occupy a separate compartment from our soul. We don't read Shakespeare to feed the intellect and then the Sugar Sunbeams Daily Devotional to feed the soul. What feeds the intellect should feed the soul. What feeds the soul should feed the intellect as well. This is the culminating idea of a Charlotte Mason education, about which more later.
In the meantime, Mason suggests giving children ample opportunity to interrogate ideas, chiefly through daily discussion of current events or movements, and through interactions with their reading. It's not enough simply to want what is right. A well-ordered will is a good thing, but part of its ordering involves knowing what to want, and recognizing it even when you don't see it. "We must be able to answer the arguments in the air," she says, "not so much by counter reasons as by exposing the fallacies in such arguments and proving on our own part the opposite position." In addition to helping the child's will habituate itself to choosing rightly, the objective of education is to habituate his reason to recognizing truth and discerning what is false.
Rather than presenting everything as true (and worrying that every word of every book you read is factual), your job as a parent is to encourage your child to ask questions: why did this writer say X? what do I think about that? what do I already know is true? how does this assertion line up with what I already know is true?
This is, frankly, exhausting sometimes. I sympathize with busy parents of many young children, who in their daily battle against all the forces of chaos just want to open the book, read it, know that what they've read is right, and move on. Unfortunately, what you offer when you succumb to this temptation is not education. At worst this approach can amount to indoctrination: just listen to what's in the book, accept that it's true, and be able to parrot it back. At the very least this the-book-holds-all-the-truths-you-need-to-know approach constitutes a failure to nurture in your children their own God-given faculties for avoiding indoctrination. It's a failure to help them do what their minds are made to do, which is think.
Education is often exhausting for the person facilitating the education. It's hard and serious work. My older daughter is a classroom teacher; I see how hard she works, and it's a rebuke to me – having taken on the education of my own children, I have no right to think that I should not work as hard, or take my work as seriously, as she does.
So, once again, I'm ending on some kind of exhortation. I have probably said this before, but: if you have chosen to educate your children, this is the work, and these are the stakes. It's not about content and information. It's not about obedience and "being good." It is about truth and falsehood, discernment and blindness, the right use of reason vs. reason as a closed-circuit echo chamber.