Window above the doors into the Basilica of Our Lady, Help of Christians, at Belmont Abbey College, containing the monastic community's crest and motto: Crescat, which means, Let it grow.
At last! We arrive at the end: Principle 20. And look at the road we've traveled:
Naturally these posts consist of my own narrations – my telling-back – of the sections of Charlotte Mason's Volume 6: Towards a Philosophy of Education to which these principles correspond. I encourage you to read this volume for yourself, because you will undoubtedly cultivate insights and make connections that I do not. It's my hope, nevertheless, that the insights I have had and the connections I have made – especially in reading this volume against parts of Thomas Aquinas's Summa Theologica and his writing on prayer and contemplation – will be of use to you.
As I have noted in previous posts, these 20 Principles don't exist, as individual ideas, in a vacuum. They grow one out of another and integrate with each other. The same themes recur in them and tie them together. You can't cherry-pick one idea out of this list and say: This is what Charlotte Mason says about education. The whole set are what Charlotte Mason says about education, and you won't fully understand one principle until you've read and meditated on them all – which it is worth your time to do. I would venture to say that if you don't have time to think about educational ideas, then you do not have time to be an educator. But I have tried to make this admittedly daunting work easier for you in profiling each principle, and at least starting a mental conversation about it.
Let's look now at Principle 20, about which on the surface of things there doesn't seem to be that much to say that hasn't already been said.
We allow no separation to grow up between the intellectual and 'spiritual' life of children, but teach them that the Divine Spirit has constant access to their spirits, and is their Continual Helper in all the interests, duties and joys of life. (source)
It would seem that there's not that much more to say, because we've been thinking this very thought all along. Implicit in so many of these principles is the idea of the sacramentality of education – because REALITY is sacramental. There's nothing you can look at, in the entire created order, including good things made by human beings, in which the goodness of God does not make itself manifest. There is nothing of truth and excellence that you can study that does not reflect the truth and excellence of its ultimate Author.
Although Charlotte Mason herself was not a Catholic, but a Victorian Anglican (with some of the unfortunate prejudices about Catholicism that were endemic to mainstream 19th-century English culture), this is an extremely Catholic thought to end on. It recovers something essential that had been lost in the cultural fallout of the Reformation: this very notion of reality as sacramental. The Catholic historian Christopher Dawson discusses this fallout at length in his Dividing of Christendom, and also in The Crisis of Western Education (hint: this division between the divine and the material lies at the root of said crisis, and resulted in modes of education that were largely utilitarian, fitting children for future purposes, rather than considering that the soul needed more than catechism lessons in order to thrive).
Charlotte Mason, like her predecessor, the school superintendent (and poet) Matthew Arnold, was concerned that education address the hunger of the whole person for goodness, beauty, and truth. Though neither Mason nor Arnold was a Catholic – Arnold was not particularly a religious believer – what they discerned is something fundamentally true: that a person is an integrated complex of soul, intellect, and body, and you can't really say where one begins and the other leaves off. You can't separate those things into tidy categories. If you are a runner, for example, as one of my sons is, and you go out and run 20 miles, is it just your body that benefits? If so, then how do you explain the exhilaration you feel while you're running, or the sense of self-mastery, the deep pleasure of exercising a discipline? Those responses, it seems to me, are all responses from something other than your nerve endings. They have to do with something that's not purely material, but intellectual and spiritual as well. It's that awareness of the possibilities of human experience – to be physical, intellectual, and spiritual, all at once – that drives Charlotte Mason's vision of education.
And again, as Catholics, we have a word for that: sacramental. We don't understand reality in dualistic terms, with "religious things" and then "everything else." Yes, God is in the church, in the tabernacle, because that is where He chooses to make Himself most fully and substantially available to us – but He's not limited to the church and the tabernacle. He IS what is real, and He is present in anything that is real. Otherwise it wouldn't be real. It wouldn't exist at all. To know God, certainly we want to know the truths and practices of our faith, and to encounter Him in the sacraments, but at the same time, He holds out the entire created universe, in which He is present and alive, as a means of coming to know Him.
Interestingly, Thomas speaks of the intellect as "the incorruptible portion of our soul," and the faculty most fully engaged in the pursuits of the contemplative life, whose object is to meditate on the Divine Truth. In his view, a life focused this way is not chiefly an emotional or appetitive life: the contemplative isn't ginning up a lot of excited feelings about God. The contemplative life isn't simply piety. It is reflection on true things – chiefly God Himself, but subsidiarily, any lesser truth, because truth points one way, and one way only.
At the same time (also interestingly), Thomas notes that contemplation isn't entirely divorced from "the appetitive powers." Nothing in our being is ever dis-integrated from other aspects of our being. Thomas says:
But while the contemplative life mainly consists in the intellect, it derives its principle from the affective powers, since a man is moved to contemplation by love of God. And since the end corresponds to the principle, it follows that the goal and term of the contemplative life is in the affective powers, in the sense, namely that a man finds pleasure in the very sight of a thing which he loves, and this very pleasure stirs up in him a yet greater love. (source)
Elsewhere, again, he notes that while God Himself is the ultimate object of contemplation, contemplation of lesser things that are good and true, and that therefore manifest His goodness, point us in that direction – and, I would suggest, offer that stirring of love that does inspire us to love God. These "lesser things" are largely represented by the various branches of knowledge, all of which in their way show forth something of God's perfection. They are meant to move the student who pursues them to love not only the things of this world which study may invite him to contemplate more deeply, but to a greater love, in the end, of their Creator and Source, in whom he may hope to find all those good things and more, on entering the heavenly kingdom at last.
It is this idea, really, that forms the capstone of Charlotte Mason's 20 Principles. What she is offering is a deeply, sacramentally Christian education. She doesn't mean to be offering a deeply, sacramentally Catholic education, but in fact that is what she offers: not school with some Catholic add-ons (we do workbooks and then say the rosary), or even Catholic content (we do Catholic history, Catholic science, Catholic math, Catholic literature, Catholic art, Catholic music . . . and we don't do anything that doesn't say "Catholic") – but education infused with and inspired by the Catholic – which is to say the true – understanding of reality, and of the human person, made in the Image of God, as an integral part of that reality.
Again, this is the idea that brackets, underlines, and suffuses everything else Charlotte Mason has written on the subject of education. You can't really understand the previous nineteen principles outside the context of this idea. Likewise, the previous nineteen principles have served to elucidate, in full and specific and all-encompassing ways, what this principle looks like as an idea lived out daily.
I hope this series has been a blessing to you.