“May their words be as goads, and as nails deeply fastened in” - Fr Hugh Barbour on St Thomas Aquinas and Urban Hannon

In anticipation of the 750th anniversary of the death of St Thomas this week, we are pleased to share with our readers today the text of the Foreword contributed by Fr Hugh Barbour, O.Praem., to a newly published work that will be of considerable interest to readers of NLM: Urban Hannon’s Thomistic Mystagogy: St. Thomas Aquinas’s Commentaries on the Mass, a careful synthesis of the saint's remarks on the greatest liturgical act of the Church as found in various of his writings. Fr Barbour does a splendid job introducing this book, explaining why it is important, and offering a gentle but firm critique of liturgical minimalism, positivism, and legalism, which he sees as suffocators of mystery, reverence, and beauty. 

Foreword to Thomistic Mystagogy
by
Fr Hugh Barbour, O.Praem.

“The words of the wise are as goads, and as nails deeply fastened in, which by the counsel of masters are given from one shepherd. More than these, my son, require not. Of the making of many books there is no end: and much study is an affliction of the flesh.” (Ecclesiastes 12, 11–12)

Few are the books in any area of theological inquiry of which we could say that they were so sufficient as to render further searches unnecessary. Yet such as there are, if and when we find them, are concise and illuminating, and one finds oneself saying, “Finally I get it!” “I’ve never understood before as I do now.”

These are the “goads,” the “counsels of masters,” given as though “by one shepherd,” which become as “nails deeply fastened” in our understanding. Only when we come across such works do we understand how it is that “the making of many books” and “much study” can be a merely futile exercise and affliction. The boon we have received in insight simply disposes us to contemplate what we now possess in knowledge, and to cease from further restless precisions and amplifications which do not add to the intensive quality of our thinking, even if they may add a certain quantity of erudition.

The authors of such books are not the greatest masters themselves, but rather the keenest students of the greatest masters. They match their masters, not in the grand volume of their comprehensive writings, but in the lean precision of their appreciation. They are hard to list, since their authority is established in a very relative way, and there are always more waiting to be known.^[1]

In fact, one may say without exaggeration that it is the task of every careful student to compose such lesser accounts of his greater masters’ teaching in order to keep hold of the insights he has received from them—if nothing else, in a notebook of commonplaces, some file to which we add over time. This may be a happier reason than Qoheleth’s for faciendi libros nullus est finis!

After all, are not the Summae of St. Thomas themselves, thanks to their very method, an ordering of such little, lesser, portable treatises woven together formally, reflecting architectonically how the whole of things comes forth and returns to its principle in sound judgment, while retaining the relation of each article in itself to the way in which we come to know, which is not the pattern of the whole, but that of our intelligence in motion? And thus the order of things and the order of coming to know are in their different ways reflected?

Regarding St. Thomas’s teaching on the Eucharist, which is our interest here, Urban Hannon offers us the second half of a work not his own which needed to be completed. Thomistic Mystagogy is, I would have the reader understand, an unintended (to Urban) completion in precisely Thomistic terms, a kind of companion volume, to Dom Ansgar Vonier’s A Key to the Doctrine of the Eucharist. Hannon would insist that Vonier would have done it better, but he didn’t, and now surely is gratified from his place on high to favor the younger theologian’s efforts.

The century which separates the publication of Hannon’s work from the great abbot of Buckfast’s only serves to illustrate the appositeness of this pairing. The key work of clarification of the sacramental sense of St. Thomas’s eucharistic doctrine, and the demands this sense makes on the consistency and rigor of its exposition and application, sets it apart from any positivistic or practical presentation. And yet it is just this sort of positivism which characterizes the preoccupation of the intervening liturgical movements, pre- and post-conciliar, and their approaches to the Mass. In the meantime, some Thomists are still content to entertain the French School rationales of the “essence” of the Mass as being found in the dispositions of the soul of the Incarnate Word, and not simply the offering of his body and blood!

So it is time to renew the forces of the greatest of eucharistic theologies by a return to Thomas pure and simple. Taking up Urban Hannon’s Thomistic Mystagogy will provide Aquinas’s attentive students with just that lively positive exposition which avoids the deadly positivism both of the ceremonial manuals of the pre-conciliar sort and of the bureaucratic “Office of Liturgy” nomenklatura authorities of the post-conciliar sort. What we need now is historical continuity with the liturgical sense of the Christian tradition—not a ruthless, historicist, “scientific” elimination of all allegory and subjective devotion, which is as foreign to the Epistle to the Hebrews as to Durandus or any of the medievals.

St. Thomas’s understanding of the unique reality of the sacramental order is the exhilarating and demanding summit of his doctrine of the Eucharist. This is Vonier’s contribution. Thomas’s devout exposition of the solemnities of the sacrament in the Mass is ours thanks to Hannon’s present work, which is about the things which are “said and done around the sacrament,” which are not its very being, but which nonetheless are not superfluous for its “being well.” This is the kind of simple Thomistic language which overcomes a mere essentialist minimalism, for when would it ever in practice be interesting to separate a valued thing in its esse from its bene esse? One could never take away from the theology offered here an attitude which is accustomed to thinking, “Well, at least the Mass was valid!” And how many of us over the years, sadly, have said or thought something similar.

For this we can blame a certain kind of deracinated theology of the essence of the Mass, and a certain kind of liturgical theology. Let us have no more of either. A minimally valid Mass is an illicit and sacrilegious one. Canon law forbids as nefas, literally “unspeakable,” the confection of the sacrament outside the Missarum solemnia even in extreme urgency. St. Thomas’s eucharistic theology is not a matter of settling for less, just because we know what less is.

A final fraternal caution to fellow Thomists: Hannon is wise to point out as a faithful disciple, and not merely a fan of Aquinas, that Thomas is rarely novel in his ideas, and that his use of others’ opinions makes them no less his own. Too often, in their zeal to justify the Angelic Doctor’s superiority, Thomists have looked for some new insight or essentially “Thomistic” teaching, hitherto unknown. Here, however, in Thomas’s mystagogical instructions, as in all his teaching on sacramental and liturgical matters, we find only a faithful recitation of what has been handed on in the rite of the sacraments, and which might easily have been written by almost any twelfth- or thirteenth-century theologian.

Nowhere is this habit of his more evident than in his preferential and well-nigh exclusive use of the authority of the Pseudo-Areopagite, whom he prefers to call simply Dionysius, in matters which touch on hierarchical worship, whether sacramental or angelic. This attitude an all-pervasive one.^[2] Thomas, would, it seems, have been ashamed to be novel in expounding so great a mystery. And this quality, perhaps, is what gives his twin expositors, Vonier and Hannon, their own measure of humility and thus of a certain Thomistic greatness. “May their words be as goads, and as nails deeply fastened in,” as they unite our minds to the sacrament of the sacrifice offered on the cross.

Fr. Hugh Barbour, O.Praem.
St. Michael’s Abbey, California
January 1, 2024
Circumcision of Our Blessed Lord

 

Thomistic Mystagogy is available in paperback, hardcover, or ebook, directly from the publisher, or from all Amazon outlets.

NOTES

[1] For theists and Christians generally one might name the Lewis of Mere Christianity or The Abolition of Man, and the Chesterton of Orthodoxy, and for Thomists, Pieper shines out, and Sertillanges, and Clerissac for ecclesiology, and for more recent students of the Mass there is the incomparable Joseph de Sainte Marie (Salleron), O.C.D., then for the understanding of prayer there is Gabriel Dieffenbach O.F.M. Cap.’s woefully little known gem Common Mystic Prayer, and for Mariology the suave treatise of De Koninck, Ego Sapientia: The Wisdom That Is Mary.

[2] In fact, throughout the works of St. Thomas, Dionysius is regarded as a supreme authority after sacred scripture and before the other Fathers in exegesis, theological method, metaphysics, and angelology, as well as in liturgy and spirituality. This, it is said, is because he is presumed to be the earliest non-canonical writer, the convert of St. Paul at Athens named in Acts 17. And yet it can hardly be that an authority so developed, consistent, and universal could be based only on a simple historical error. The content of his teaching, however historically recommended, is beyond question. The Areopagite’s teaching and the Church’s reception of it are undeniable and immoveable facts of history and Christian theology. One need only examine, for example, the acute use of the Areopagite in medieval English vernacular literature on prayer to verify its far-reaching influence. Of no one else did St. Thomas say in the most absolute terms, and precisely regarding the metaphysical principles of speculative thought, what he said of the Areopagite and his Christian Platonist disciples in his commentary De Divinis Nominibus: “Verissima est eorum opinio.” One can only hope that Thomists will begin to take his words formalissime as they were clearly meant and draw fruitful conclusions therefrom! We await a movement of Dionysian Thomists.

Rite by Rote

Why learning of the texts of the liturgy will transform worship, improve singing, improve art, and renew the culture.

In some ways, I am the product of the new-model education that became trendy in the 1970s and which sought to throw out all tradition. The emphasis on experiential learning meant that I had very little formal training in grammar and punctuation - I once managed to talk my way into a job at the Sunday Times as a sub-editor without knowing how to use speech marks. If you think that my work is full of typos now, you should have seen it before Grammarly told me my errors! And I can’t recite a line of Shelley or Shakespeare to save my life, let alone offer you a coherent exegesis of the text. (I even had to look up “exegesis” on the internet prior to writing this paragraph, as I wasn’t sure if I was using the right word.)

As we were going through this educational revolution, many - including my parents - were critical of the trend and argued for the re-introduction of the traditional methods, most simply characterized by the “three R’s - reading, writing and ’rithmetic.” At the time, I was glad to avoid such horrors (as I saw them), but I have to say that now I am not so sure that my 1970s-style education by osmosis given was a good thing. In fact, I am going to suggest that we not only promote all three of those Rs, but also introduce a fourth, one that I hated even more when I was a teenager - Rote.

The purpose of a great books education is to give us familiarity with certain key texts that characterize the culture and so form us to participate in it. Collectively, they form our story, in which, it is hoped, our own personal stories will participate. The more familiar we are with the story of our nation and our people, the more likely we are to be contributors to and conservers of it.

This aspect of education - inculturation by storytelling - is as old as culture itself. The Greeks had the Iliad and Odyssey, the Romans had the Aeneid, and the Israelites had Sacred Scripture, which itself tells us of this principle of inculturation; the story of the Israelites is to be retold to successive generations in order to preserve their faith. At different junctures, it describes how this was done in order to redirect a straying people; for example, we see Moses, Joshua, and Samuel in the Old Testament, and Stephen and Peter in the New, doing just this.

As Christians, we are Israelites by adoption, and any education that doesn’t focus on the Bible, or does not make it a central part of the education, is not Christian. In our case, we need both the Old Testament, the original Scripture, as referred to by St Paul in his letters, for example, and the addition to this, the inspired Scripture of the New Testament (including Paul’s letters). It is the latter that connects us to the former, bringing the Gentiles into Israel through Christ, which completes the story of salvation for all humanity. I am all for learning other classical texts that typically make up the Great Books curriculum too; they represent good supporting material, but I would say that they are not absolutely necessary. However, an education that has classical texts but little or no Scripture is a waste of time.

You can’t become a doctor by taking the course in a pre-med program, no matter how thoroughly you know the material. Studying Dante, Beowulf or even Greek philosophy is not a bad thing, but it is wrong to place these at the center of our education or to see them as absolutely necessary. The study of salvation history, on the other hand, ought to be mandatory. I don’t regret at all having had little or no exposure to classical texts in my education. I find literature, and poetry especially, incredibly dull. But I do wish I had learned the value of Scripture.

If we were Protestant, the discussion would stop there, but we’re not. The liturgy itself is a living-out of the story of salvation, a drama in which we are participants. The study of salvation history in Scripture prepares us for the worship of God in which our formation as Christians is more profound. The Bible is dependent upon the liturgy for its true meaning - it was written to be proclaimed in a liturgical context (as well as studied outside it), and contains much of the blueprint for it.

Jean Danielou’s book The Bible and the Liturgy explains this well, to quote from the summary of the book written by the publisher:

The Bible and the Liturgy illuminates, better than has ever before been done, the vital and meaningful bond between Bible and liturgy. Father Daniélou aims at bringing clearly before his reader’s minds the fact that the Church’s liturgical rites and feasts are intended, not only to transmit the grace of the sacraments but to instruct the faithful in their meaning as well as the meaning of the whole Christian life. It is through the sacraments in their role as signs that we learn. So that their value will be appreciated, Daniélou attempts to help us rediscover the significance of these rites so that the sacraments may once again be thought of as the prolongation of the great works of God in the Old Testament and the New.

The deepest participation in the liturgy will come from an intimate awareness of the texts, as well as a deep understanding of their meaning and through them, how to engage, body, soul, and spirit with the dynamic exchange of love that is taking place. This is where rote learning comes in.

The more we know and understand the texts and can sing those parts we are required to without having our noses buried in a book, the more we can engage authentically with what is happening. It will allow us, for example, to engage with art. Furthermore, we are likely now to require art that speaks of all the liturgical activity going on, and it is this that will stimulate the reestablishment of an authentic schema of liturgical art in our churches, one that actually nourishes our prayer. This, in turn, could become a powerful driving force for cultural change, for it is the forms and styles that are intimately connected with authentic worship that will drive this.

For those who wish to learn to pray with sacred art, especially in the context of worship, freeing ourselves up to look at the art in the church or icon corner will help; knowing and understanding the texts and their chants, gives us the ability to sing along, so that we are less reliant on the missal and the psalter that will do this. I am not expecting memorization of the whole text of the liturgy, but we should start somewhere if we haven’t already. The more we can do this, starting with those that are repeated most often, I suggest, the freer we will be.

Authentic liturgical art induces right prayer when we take the trouble to look at it during our worship. Currently, in my observation, (thinking now of the pious and orthodox) there is very little engagement with art beyond devotional prayer, and so it becomes too much an internalized, introspective cerebral activity. This contemplative aspect should be there too, make no mistake, but it should not dominate to the degree that it does. I had these same thoughts in mind with previous postings about Baroque art in the Latin Mass and the placement of choirs in the church.

In my opinion, the damage to our culture and our faith through this lack of engagement of the whole person cannot be underestimated. The prospects of cultural renewal are greatly diminished without it, and in my reading of history, this may well have been what caused the dislocation between the culture of faith and contemporary culture that Benedict XVI describes as taking place in the early 19th century, in his book the Spirit of the Liturgy.

I am currently attempting to put this into practice myself. Rote learning is a very difficult process for me - especially as I am now in my late 50s - but I am doing my best. I sing repeatedly the texts of the liturgy so that I can look at my icon corner as I do so. I have set myself the target of learning by heart  the chants of oft-repeated liturgical passages, the hymns, psalms, canticles, prayers and so on.

For a man to start doing this in his late 50s is a difficult task. If I had been given the chance in my first 10 years of life, the riches that it would have given me would have been great. Still, I am where I am...back to the Gloria and the Benedictus!

Candle Artist Offers Unique “Theological Virtues” Design for Easter 2022

Gina Switzer, whose candle work David Clayon featured at NLM five years ago, continues to offer custom-made candles for liturgical use—Paschal candles, baptismal candles, and the like (see her website for a full listing and examples).

Her Paschal Candle design for 2022 symbolizes Faith, Hope, and Charity by means of the Peacock, the Artichoke, and the Pomegranate. The following explanation was shared with NLM by the artist.

“This year’s candle is ornate in design and more elusive in symbolism.

“The goal of this design is to draw the eye of the viewer by using a kind of sumptuous beauty to begin the questions; starting with, ‘Wait...what is this candle?’; then ‘Why peacocks?,’ etc. The peacock, artichoke, and pomegranate are ancient symbols with various meanings that are not readily apparent. I tried to create a candle that is beautiful and worthy of contemplation and of asking questions.

“The Peacock as a symbol of Faith. The peacock, stunningly beautiful in color, design, and flair is more than just a pretty animal. The ancients believed its flesh to be incorruptible because it does not rot like other flesh, but only dries out. St. Augustine attested to experimenting as such in The City of God. Early Christians baptized the peacock as a symbol of eternal life and used its image on sarcophagi and murals in the catacombs. The tail feathers of the peacock molt at the end of summer and begin to grow back around Christmas, returning in full glory and more brilliant than before around Easter. The feather cycle and the connection to eternal life makes the peacock a fitting symbol of the Resurrection. On this candle the peacocks drink from living water flowing from a font, the waters of baptism. They proclaim the theological virtue of Faith based in the Resurrection, for as Paul say in 1 Cor 15:14, ‘If Christ has not been raised, then our own preaching is in vain and your faith is in vain.’

“The Artichoke as a symbol of Hope. The artichoke is a symbol of hope because the tough, thorny leaves protect the soft, tender heart. The Christian interpretation goes back to Genesis: ‘Cursed is the ground because of you; in toil you shall eat of it all the days of your life; thorns and thistles it brings forth to you’ (Gen. 3:17-18). The artichoke is a thistle. While this scripture verse truly bespeaks a terrible curse, these words should also give us hope! God could have justly punished Adam and Eve with instant physical death and damnation for their sin of disobedience. He did not. He removed them from the Garden but kept them alive as an act of His Mercy and to set the stage for our Savior, who would be born of their lineage. (Oh happy fault!) In toil we grow our food; it takes work to prepare foodstuffs to be eaten. Preparing an artichoke in particular takes perseverance and a bit of ‘hope.’ Trim the thorns. Boil the globe. Peel away each leaf. Scrape away the nascent flower. Finally, the small tender heart is revealed and the hope for a tasty morsel is revealed. In light of the Resurrection, it seems fitting to contemplate the hope of the transformation of a cursed thorny thistle into a delicacy, like our own thorny selves becoming holy through the grace of Christ’s redeeming work on the Cross. On this candle the artichoke is represented in various growth stages with the thistle flowers shooting up to meet the peacock tails as a call and response from Faith to Hope and Hope to Faith, each reaching to the other.

“The Pomegranate as a symbol of Charity. Like the peacock, the pomegranate as a symbol has deep roots in pre-Christian and Christian traditions. The multitude of seeds readily signify fertility in older traditions. But the deep red juice allows the Catholic imagination to see the flow of blood from Christ’s side pouring forth to bring new life and fecundity in the Church. An NLM article describes the pomegranate as a symbol of Charity because ‘it gives of what it contains that is most delicious and precious: it gives itself just like Christ did in his infinite charity through the Eucharist, born in his heart—that heart which he allowed to be opened for us through the striking of the spear of the soldier during his Passion, that the divine red liquid might flow forth.’ On this candle the pomegranate is centered on a symmetrical, ornate gold cross. It is also a feature in the bands representing the Alpha and the Omega, the peacock and the artichoke because, in the end, Charity remains.”

Gina noted that priests will sometimes “preach from the Paschal candle” at Mass, at baptisms and funerals. If the candle itself is decorated with a lot of symbolism, it makes it an obvious reference point for elucidation, and of course a homily about peacocks, artichokes, and pomegranates will be a lot more memorable than a homily in the style of Garrigou-Lagrange about the theological virtues.

Regina Candles (the name of Gina's enterprise) has multiple Paschal Candle designs as well as personalized baptismal candles, to promote and build a culture that recognizes children’s baptisms as their birth into the life and love of the Trinity. She encourages people to keep the candles in a known place and to light them once a year briefly on the anniversary of baptism as a way of reminding ourselves of this immense gift and mystery.

TradiVox: A Major Catechetical Enterprise with Liturgical Resonances

As many already know, an inspiring restoration project is currently underway with the endorsement of Bishop Athanasius Schneider, to restore the traditional Catholic catechisms of the past millennium. For those unfamiliar with Tradivox, here’s a glimpse:

Catechism Restoration Project from Tradivox, Inc. on Vimeo.

This is a monumental work, comprising archival manuscript recovery, text and graphics restoration, reformatting and republication of dozens of classical texts as an entirely new catechism series – all demonstrating the continuity of Catholic faith, moral practice, and liturgical life across time and space. The catechisms will not only be published in book form, but also organized into a massive online database that will be able instantly to show the consistency of teaching across centuries on any subject treated.

NLM readers in particular should note one fascinating aspect of many traditional catechisms: their witness to the Roman liturgical tradition (both before and after the Council of Trent), and how significantly this shaped the formation of the Catholic faithful over the centuries. Reading these texts is like climbing into a time machine to watch the old adage, lex orandi, lex credendi play out before one’s very eyes; one is made aware that the signs and symbols of the traditional Roman Rite had the effect of deeply inculcating Catholic dogma, which in turn could be explicated to the faithful of every age and station of life, and at several levels of depth.

To take just a few examples, from the simple, 1614 “eye catechism” of St. Robert Bellarmine (forthcoming in Tradivox’s Volume 2):

Notice how the figure depicted here on the Altar is the resurrected Christ – indicating his presently glorified state by which He communicates Himself to us sacramentally. Note also the visual match between the standing Christ and the stooping priest, through whom He gives himself to the faithful, and the kneeling faithful, ready to receive what Christ gives through His minister. Note how the miniature includes a physical barrier separating the priest and acolyte from the faithful, emphasizing the fundamental difference between the ordained or ministerial priesthood and the universal priesthood of the faithful.

Here is another image from the same text, showing the seriousness with which the Mass was regarded as a propitiatory sacrifice for the living and the dead. Note the gravity and attention paid to it by the faithful in attendance, who conceive of themselves as there to fully and actively contribute to the mediated extension of the salvific fruits of Christ’s saving work on the Cross:

As these small examples help illustrate, the traditional catechisms hold far more than didactic expositions. Indeed, many exude an art and piety that border on the poetic, the mystical – even the heroic, given the fact that many of them closely touched the lives of Confessors and Martyrs (for instance, each of the three separate catechisms reproduced in Tradivox’s Volume 1 was penned or printed by Catholic priests who suffered for the Faith in Elizabethan England).

Viewing the profound mystagogia and liturgical piety at work in the traditional catechisms in light of the historic integrity of the Roman Rite itself, one begins to understand just why and how many Catholics found the strength to die rather than violate Catholic liturgy in the 16th and 17th centuries, and why many of these catechisms found their origin in the same milieu.

One wonders if today, when nearly 70% of self-identified Catholics in the U.S. deny that Our Lord is truly present in the Blessed Sacrament (aggregating the Pew Forum survey and the EWTN survey), an “average Catholic” would die in defense of his liturgical or doctrinal heritage?

The old catechisms offer a way back. They bear witness to how things were, and how they could be again. Parents will find in them a lodestar for handing on the Faith of our Fathers to the next generation. Students will find simple and straightforward answers to questions of faith and morals. Priests will find exhaustive anecdotes, explanations, and illustrations to use in homiletics and systematic instruction. Scholars will find compendious annotations and fascinating apparatus for cross-reference and historical comparison. Non-Catholics will find in them a compelling testimony to the truly divine nature and mission of the Church established by Our Lord Jesus Christ. Everyone will find in them an essential consistency and a reliable guide in this increasingly confusing period.

As one who has been involved in the genesis of TradiVox, I urge NLM readers this Lent to consider supporting this incredibly timely and much-needed restoration project – an enduring monument to our Catholic forebears, and a legacy of Faith to pass on to our children.

Donate to Tradivox here.

View the Tradivox volumes (so far) here.

Share their video in your own circles here.

Hale and Hearty - Health and Beauty in the Human Person, Part 2

Does it help a doctor to treat the patient if he appreciates the beauty of the person and relates to him as a Christian? I think so.

In this article, I argue that the best doctors will be aware of what human health is to be able to treat them. Furthermore, to know what health is requires them to understand what a human person is, which means the study and acceptance of Christian anthropology. I argue that the very best doctor - or health practitioner of any description - will do more than grasp this intellectually, but will relate to the patient as a human person. To relate with a patient fully involves more than simply the adoption of Christian morality. It is a Christian formation, with the liturgy and mystagogical catechesis at its heart that will most powerfully form a good doctor.

In the first part of this article, I tried to establish a good working definition of health. In this part, I discuss why the best doctor, one who can help a patient to achieve this ideal, will be one who relates to others as a Christian. I explain why, in my view, such a doctor will be one who deeply appreciates also the beauty of the human person and is formed supernaturally as a Christian through a mystagogical catechesis with the worship of God at its heart. I begin from the definition of health that established at the end of part one.

Plastic surgery is the response of the modern medical profession to the question of human beauty. The best doctors, I suggest, appreciate the beauty of the human person in a way that is not limited to physical attractiveness.

A proposed definition of health
Reflecting on all of this so far, here is a proposed definition of health: health is the harmony of all aspects of the human person - body, soul, and spirit - in accordance with our freedom to choose happiness both now and in eternity. Healthcare, regardless of what particular aspect of the human person it is focussed on is always concerned, therefore, with the treatment of the whole person and the optimization of that freedom to choose happiness.

Happiness. What is it and how do we get it?
What we all seek is happiness, and as Aristotle points out, every choice we make is done with a view to increasing our happiness. The doctor cannot prescribe happiness, but he can contribute to the freedom of the person to choose it if he knows what happiness is and what is necessary to obtain it. The source of the difficulty in defining precisely well-being and health relate with all its ramifications, I suggest, is at root a reluctance to acknowledge a fundamental truth, that happiness is what we seek in this life and the next, and that God made us that way so that we might seek Him.

Happiness is one of those words that is almost impossible to define without descending into circular definitions of the sort that we have already encountered. An inability to define the word doesn’t mean that we don’t know what it is, however. Most people who could not define it would nevertheless say that we know it when we get it, and we know when we don’t have it. Also, most people can naturally distinguish between various degrees of superficial or temporary happiness. All forms of happiness are desirable and good, but not all fulfill the desire for a deep and permanent happiness that is in our hearts.

I would make the case that happiness is in fact, indefinable - ineffable - that is, beyond words. This is a mystery that need not worry us however, for what we desire is available to all of us. I quote here from the Orthodox theologian Alexander Schmemann (d.1983):

‘The ultimate mystery of the Church consists in knowing the Holy Spirit, in receiving Him, in being in Communion with Him. It is He (and not ‘grace’) that we invoke in prayer and acquire through spiritual effort..‘For in the words of St Seraphim [of Sarov] “when the Spirit of God descends upon man and overshadows him with the fullness of His outpouring, then the human soul overflows with unspeakable joy because the Spirit of God turns to joy all that he may touch.”

‘All this means that we know the Holy Spirit only by His presence in us, the presence manifested above all in ineffable joy, peace, and fullness. Even in ordinary human language these words - joy, peace, fullness - refer to something which is precisely ineffable, which by its very nature is beyond words, definitions, and descriptions. They refer to those moments in life when life is full of life when there is no lack of and therefore no desire for anything, and this no anxiety, no fear, no frustration. Man always speaks of happiness, and indeed life is a pursuit of happiness a longing of life’s self-fulfillment. Thus one can say that the presence of the Holy Spirit in us is the fulfillment of true happiness. And since this happiness does not come from an identifiable and external cause as does our poor and worldly happiness, which disappears with the disappearance of the cause that produced it, and since it does not come from anything in this world, yet results in a joy about everything, that happiness must be the fruit in us of the coming, the presence, the abiding of someone who Himself is Life, Joy, Peace, Beauty, Fullness, Bliss. This Someone is the Holy Spirit.’

The miraculous event at Pentecost is a sign of what is available to us as Christians. The gift of divine wisdom, a gift of the Holy Spirit, is the end of all Christian education, and so ought to be incorporated into the formation of health workers too!

Treating the whole person
Given the profound unity of the human person, a single entity that is body, soul, and spirit and in which each aspect bound up with the other. There is no treating part of the person without treating the whole person, and a doctor’s treatment of the person is incomplete if it is not in accord with our desire for God.

This is about more than medical ethics. It is governed by the first assumptions of what the person is. A doctor may know all the practices of medicine, but he cannot know how to apply them properly if he doesn’t understand what makes a person free to choose happiness.

Getting the heart of the matter: the human heart used to be organ that symbolized the place where we are, as a person, the vector sum of all our thoughts, feelings and actions. Modern medicine treats it as a machine and represents it mathematically as a series of functions. This approach is good for treating heart disease, but it could be better if all this data was understood in relation to the well-being of the whole person. 

The ancient Greeks, it appears, had a greater grasp of this idea of the need for the harmony of the parts than the specialists of modern secular medicine. Their general mathematical theory of harmony and proportion began with the consideration of the beauty of things, and the realization that when we recognize that the relationship of the parts to each other is ordered to the whole and to its purpose we see it as both beautiful and good. So the consideration of what things are begins with the recognition of their beauty as a sign of their goodness. This applies to both mankind and creation. Greek medicine considered health to be the balance of the parts and ill-health, it was assumed, could be linked to an imbalance. An example would be their approach to the four ‘humors’ - yellow bile, black bile, phlegm, blood. They understood also the profound unity of the physical and spiritual, so they tried to consider how an imbalance of these humors might lead to an emotional imbalance. It is from this that we still have words in the English language related to mood or character such as bilious, phlegmatic, or sanguine (the last from “sanguis”, the Latin word for blood).

In regard to the moral life, Aristotle in his Nicomachean Ethics (a book still studied in Catholic liberal arts colleges today), directly links virtuous behavior to a proportional relationship between extremes, citing arithmetic and geometric proportions. Many people read this and think that he is speaking loosely or figuratively, but he uses these terms with precise meanings in mind. (If you want to understand how, you can read of the mathematics of proportion and harmony in Boethius’s De Institione Arithemetica and De Institutione Musica, or my summarization of those principles in The Way of Beauty. These are also taught in my class offered by Pontifex University, called The Mathematics of Beauty.)

In considering the value of what the ancients did in the field of medicine, I am not suggesting that we adopt their scientific understanding of the human person which was inferior to that of the present day. Rather we should think about how this holistic approach to medicine can restore the humane to healthcare. Nor is this an argument for abandoning specialization in medicine. It does seem appropriate for a physician to primarily consider bodily health, but at the same, it seems reasonable to say that he cannot be a good physician without some awareness, at least, of how his specialization relates to the whole.

The modern doctor, for example, very often considers a chemical imbalance and its connection to unhappiness, and prescribes antidepressants. To do this without considering the possibility that a chemical imbalance might be the result of spiritual ills (which is different even from considering it to be a mental problem) could lead to a wrong diagnosis and treatment. Unhappiness, like physical pain, reveals a difficulty and on these occasions treating it with antidepressants might be akin to treating a broken bone with painkillers.

The Sacred Heart, by David Clayton, 20th century. Devotion to the Sacred Heart gives us an appreciation for Christ's humanity. Perhaps also, ironically, by meditation upon the symbol of the heart as the seat of the whole person, it can give us (including those of us who are in the medical professions) an appreciation for the spiritual aspects of man also.

Beauty and Health
Defining health in this way creates a direct connection to our perception of the beauty of the human person. In the traditional Western approach, beauty is the proper ordering of the parts of something in relation to each other, so that the whole is ordered to its purpose. We apprehend that beauty we are discerning this right pattern of the parts to each other and of the whole to its purpose.

Human beauty, therefore, could be defined as the radiance of health.

This definition speaks a deeper recognition of the human person than the superficial recognition of sexual attractiveness, which is a true but incomplete assessment of human beauty. To recognize a person as beautiful in this way - radiantly healthy - is to do more even than to grasp vital information about his health. It must be apprehended by one who appreciates that he is in relation to the person regarded, and is sympathy what those goals are. This is one who loves and who takes delight in the freedom of the other.

There is real value in doctors being formed to see us in this way. For all the blood-pressure readings or vital signs, it is their judgment, formed by experience will tell them in combination with this, just by looking, how healthy a person is. Such a doctor will not only have a heightened sense of when something is wrong, he will naturally look for the restoration of balance and have a sense of how to put the parts together again, so to speak. This requires each doctor and nurse to be, as well as practitioners of medical science, to be mystics and lovers who take an interest in, and ideally even know well the patient as a person.

An education that incorporates a formation in faith and a formation in the apprehension of beauty will increase the chances of the doctor being that person. The best health practitioners will be men and women who strive to be partakers of the divine nature and who can see with the eyes of purity, and so they are kings, priests, and prophets living the life of the Spirit (in common with all Christians). This is why medical training ought not to be separated from a spiritual formation in the Christian life. The good doctor will be a man of love attuned to the beauty of the human person in the way that a mother sees the beauty of her newborn baby.

The Lucca Madonna by Jan Van Eyck, Flemish, 15th century. It is the love of a parent for the child that allows her to see the beauty of a baby in a way that others don't. All people, by virtue of our humanity, are as beautiful as a baby, and it is our lack of love for others that restricts our ability to see it. Nevertheless, the recognition of the beauty of the whole person is an ideal that we can strive for, difficult though it is to achieve.

Clearly, this is asking a lot of our doctors and nurses and something that no training can ever guarantee for them. Medical exams can test knowledge of the information that might aid such a transformation, but they can’t measure the transformation itself. Nevertheless making medical students aware of the principles outlined, and offering them mystagogical catechesis and spiritual guidance directed to these ends should be a matter of policy and I would make it a priority over any other general education, even the traditional Great Books and Liberal Arts programs that American Catholic colleges and universities offer. This is, I suggest, the authentic role of our Newman centers on the university campuses and it is not beyond any of them. I believe that if they were offering this, the uptake would be from a pool far wider than simply medical students!

But let all those that seek thee be joyful and glad in thee, and let all such as delight in thee say always The Lord be praised. (Psalm 70 (69), 4)

Hippocrates (460-370 BC)

Hale and Hearty - Health and Beauty in the Human Person, Part 1

What is health? What does it mean to be healthy? We use the word all the time, but could you define it? And does it even matter?

In this article, I argue that the best doctors will be aware of what human health is to be able to treat them. Furthermore, to know what health is requires them to understand what a human person is, which means the study and acceptance of Christian anthropology. I argue that the very best doctor - or health practitioner of any description - will do more than grasp this intellectually but will relate to the patient as a human person. To relate with a patient fully involves more than simply the adoption of Christian morality. It is a Christian formation, with the liturgy and mystagogical catechesis at its heart that will most powerfully form a good doctor. The article will be presented in two parts. In today's I try to establish a good working definition of health and why it is important to do so. In part two, which will be posted on Thursday, I discuss why the best doctor, one who can help a patient to achieve this ideal, will be one who relates to others as a Christian. I explain why, in my view, such a doctor will be one who deeply appreciates also the beauty of the human person and is formed supernaturally as a Christian through a mystagogical catechesis with the worship of God at its heart.

A Visit to the Quack, by Hogarth, English 18th century. We can expect better today as the treatment of bodily ailments has improved dramatically, but to what end?

Given that health is something we all desire, one would imagine we could say what it is, but in fact and perhaps surprisingly, it’s not that easy. When I looked up the word in an online dictionary it defined it as a negative: a state of being free from illness or injury. This, surely, is inadequate? For while it tells us what we don’t want - illness and injury - it doesn’t define the good that we do want, health.

Philosophically, it seems to be an inversion: the usual approach is to define the good as an entity and consider evil to be a distortion that restricts or reduces what is good. So by this approach, illness, and injury, as human evils, would be defined as privations of health. But if we cannot say what health is, we cannot say what a privation of health is, and accordingly, we can’t say what illness is either. So a definition of health-based upon an absence of something argument is a circular definition, effectively health is the absence of ill-health!

The right wing of Rogier van der Weiden’s Altarpiece of the Seven Sacraments, ca. 1445-50, depicting Holy Orders, Matrimony, and the Anointing of the Sick. (Public domain image from Wikimedia Commons, cropped.)

Perhaps we might suggest that health is an attribute of the human person that can be equated to a wholeness of being? This seems to be better, but still, it doesn’t quite fit. We can imagine a situation where we have an amputee or a blind man, for example, who would not be considered a whole person, could nevertheless be considered healthy.

Looking further, the World Health Organization - which, given their name, you would think ought to know - defines health as follows: Health is a state of complete physical, mental and social well-being, and not merely the absence of disease or infirmity. Similarly, Medical News Today, in an article aptly entitled, What is Good Health?, defined health as a state of complete emotional and physical well-being. Healthcare exists to help people maintain this optimal state of health.

The Barber Surgeon by Adriaen Brouwer, Flemish, 17th century. If we view limit our idea of the human person to body-as-machine, then aren't our modern doctors just glorified and highly-trained barbers? I would argue so, except that at least the barber is usually sufficiently interested you as a person to ask you where you're going for your holidays. No doctor has ever asked me that! 

These seem to be getting closer, but in order to understand what these definitions really mean, we need to have a clear understanding of what we mean by physical, mental, social or emotional well-being and unless we can do that, we are still stuck. Well-being is described in the dictionary as a state of health, happiness, and prosperity. This still leaves us floundering somewhat with another circular definition: health is well-being and well-being is health.

Well-being as a state of happiness, the second part of the definition above, does seem to be a better starting point; however. I think we can disregard serious consideration of prosperity - success in material terms - which is only important to the degree that it contributes to happiness, as it seems reasonable to assume that the happy person possesses all the prosperity they need.

So while happiness is not the same thing as health, there is a strong connection, and this will be our starting point in the consideration of what health is. In order to establish what that connection is, we need to consider first why it is important to know what health is.

Why worry about the definition of health?
This matters. Unless our healthcare providers have a clear answer as to what health is, precisely, then every time we go to the doctor’s surgery or the hospital we cannot be sure that he really is trying to make us healthy! Try asking your doctor what he thinks health is and you may be disturbed to find out that he doesn’t really know.

I first learned about this anomaly through my own GP, who told me that throughout his medical training he was never formally taught exactly what health is, and that after many years of practicing, it had dawned on him how detrimental this was to healthcare provision in the country.

Most commonly the goal of a doctor’s treatment today is about relief from illness. So the doctor does not assist the patient in his search for the Good, but rather aids his escape from something bad without really concerning himself with where he is going. This is better than nothing, but it does lead to problems. At best each doctor decides for himself what health is, perhaps in consultation with the patient. We cannot establish what the Good is for a human being without consideration of him as a person, body, soul, and spirit. A physician who is trained to treat the body as a mechanical device to be repaired and often it will not occur to him to consider how it relates to the whole person, especially the spiritual aspect.

Blood-letting in the 14th century. Medical science has undoubtedly improved since then, but has the medical profession lost a sense of how to treat the whole person in the process?

As Christians know, the human person is a profound unity of body, soul, and spirit. Modern medical training studiously avoids taking any position on the spiritual well being of the person, and this has profound consequences because there can be no neutrality in this. As in all things, either we are for God, or we are against Him. A philosophy of medical treatment that takes a position of spiritual ‘neutrality’ as one of its foundational premises will inevitably be anti-spiritual, and will undermine the spiritual health of man, leading us to misery.

Doctors today, it seems to me, are trained experts who treat best the particular slice of human nature they are trained to examine, but they do not have sufficient knowledge of how that slice relates to the whole. To be able to make this connection most likely requires a study of Christian anthropology and the integration of this study with their medical training.

A way of summarizing the situation is that modern doctors are able to analyze well but are less able to synthesize. They can treat the parts in isolation, but they are less competent when putting all those parts together.

To illustrate how this can have an impact on physical health alone (without any thought for the spiritual needs of the person at this point), here are two examples. First, in the appendix of my book The Way of Beauty, entitled Liturgy and Intuition, I describe how on a number of occasions nurses in intensive care wards predicted that a patient was going to have a heart attack. The specialist cardiologist would come in to check the readings of all the vital signs, and say, on the contrary to what the nurse was saying, that there was no risk, because all readings were within the defined limits of healthy function. When asked to explain why they were worried for the patient, the nurse couldn’t say, it was simply a conviction that came from intuition. So typically, the doctor ignored the warning; then, as often as not, the patient had a heart attack. Later, it was discovered that while individual readings of heart function were within the limits of safety, there were certain combinations of such readings that were dangerous. The nurses were picking up intuitively the pattern of readings an unhealthy heart, because of their great experience of being with patients. Their experience and intuition were overriding the knowledge given to them in their training.

Here is another example, given to me by a practicing cardiologist. There are four atria in the heart and sometimes a diseased heart can reveal enlarged or diminished atria. In their training, the doctors are taught the ‘healthy’ range of sizes of each individual heart atria. However, he told me, very often there will be situations where one or more of the atria are outside the range of health, but an experienced cardiologist will ignore the reading if they judge, in light of their experience, the pattern of the relationships between one atrium and the three others to be healthy.

So just as all the parts of the heart ought to be in right relation to the others, the heart should be in right relation to the body as a whole, and the body, therefore, should be in right relation to the soul and the spirit. Then each part is in right relation with the whole.

Hugh Laurie in House. The idea of the doctor who is brilliant at what he does but seems to despise his patients and colleagues makes for great drama. But in truth, could such a doctor be even better if he was joyous and Christian? I believe so.

A proposed definition of health
Reflecting on all of this so far, here is a proposed definition of health: health is the harmony of all aspects of the human person - body, soul, and spirit - in accordance with our freedom to choose happiness both now and in eternity. Healthcare, regardless of what particular aspect of the human person it is focussed on is always concerned, therefore, with the treatment of the whole person and the optimization of that freedom to choose happiness.

Part two of this article will be posted on Thursday. ...

Rite by Rote

Why learning of the texts of the liturgy will transform worship, improve singing, improve art, and renew the culture.

In some ways, I am the product of the new-model education that became trendy in the 1970s and which sought to throw out all tradition. The emphasis on experiential learning meant that I had very little formal training in grammar and punctuation - I once managed to talk my way into a job at the Sunday Times as a sub-editor without knowing how to use speech marks. If you think that my work is full of typos now, you should have seen it before Grammarly told me my errors! And I can’t recite a line of Shelley or Shakespeare to save my life, let alone offer you a coherent exegesis of the text. (I even had to look up “exegesis” on the internet prior to writing this paragraph, as I wasn’t sure if I was using the right word.)

As we were going through this educational revolution, many - including my parents - were critical of the trend and argued for the re-introduction of the traditional methods, most simply characterized by the “three R’s - reading, writing and ’rithmetic.” At the time, I was glad to avoid such horrors (as I saw them), but I have to say that now I am not so sure that my 1970s-style education by osmosis given was a good thing. In fact, I am going to suggest that we not only promote all three of those Rs, but also introduce a fourth, one that I hated even more when I was a teenager - Rote.

The purpose of a great books education is to give us familiarity with certain key texts that characterize the culture and so form us to participate in it. Collectively, they form our story, in which, it is hoped, our own personal stories will participate. The more familiar we are with the story of our nation and our people, the more likely we are to be contributors to and conservers of it.

This aspect of education - inculturation by storytelling - is as old as culture itself. The Greeks had the Iliad and Odyssey, the Romans had the Aeneid, and the Israelites had Sacred Scripture, which itself tells us of this principle of inculturation; the story of the Israelites is to be retold to successive generations in order to preserve their faith. At different junctures, it describes how this was done in order to redirect a straying people; for example, we see Moses, Joshua, and Samuel in the Old Testament, and Stephen and Peter in the New, doing just this.

As Christians, we are Israelites by adoption, and any education that doesn’t focus on the Bible, or does not make it a central part of the education, is not Christian. In our case, we need both the Old Testament, the original Scripture, as referred to by St Paul in his letters, for example, and the addition to this, the inspired Scripture of the New Testament (including Paul’s letters). It is the latter that connects us to the former, bringing the Gentiles into Israel through Christ, which completes the story of salvation for all humanity. I am all for learning other classical texts that typically make up the Great Books curriculum too; they represent good supporting material, but I would say that they are not absolutely necessary. However, an education that has classical texts but little or no Scripture is a waste of time.

You can’t become a doctor by taking the course in a pre-med program, no matter how thoroughly you know the material. Studying Dante, Beowulf or even Greek philosophy is not a bad thing, but it is wrong to place these at the center of our education or to see them as absolutely necessary. The study of salvation history, on the other hand, ought to be mandatory. I don’t regret at all having had little or no exposure to classical texts in my education. I find literature, and poetry especially, incredibly dull. But I do wish I had learned the value of Scripture.

If we were Protestant, the discussion would stop there, but we’re not. The liturgy itself is a living-out of the story of salvation, a drama in which we are participants. The study of salvation history in Scripture prepares us for the worship of God in which our formation as Christians is more profound. The Bible is dependent upon the liturgy for its true meaning - it was written to be proclaimed in a liturgical context (as well as studied outside it), and contains much of the blueprint for it.

Jean Danielou’s book The Bible and the Liturgy explains this well, to quote from the summary of the book written by the publisher:

The Bible and the Liturgy illuminates, better than has ever before been done, the vital and meaningful bond between Bible and liturgy. Father Daniélou aims at bringing clearly before his reader’s minds the fact that the Church’s liturgical rites and feasts are intended, not only to transmit the grace of the sacraments but to instruct the faithful in their meaning as well as the meaning of the whole Christian life. It is through the sacraments in their role as signs that we learn. So that their value will be appreciated, Daniélou attempts to help us rediscover the significance of these rites so that the sacraments may once again be thought of as the prolongation of the great works of God in the Old Testament and the New.

The deepest participation in the liturgy will come from an intimate awareness of the texts, as well as a deep understanding of their meaning and through them, how to engage, body, soul, and spirit with the dynamic exchange of love that is taking place. This is where rote learning comes in.

The more we know and understand the texts and can sing those parts we are required to without having our noses buried in a book, the more we can engage authentically with what is happening. It will allow us, for example, to engage with art. Furthermore, we are likely now to require art that speaks of all the liturgical activity going on, and it is this that will stimulate the reestablishment of an authentic schema of liturgical art in our churches, one that actually nourishes our prayer. This, in turn, could become a powerful driving force for cultural change, for it is the forms and styles that are intimately connected with authentic worship that will drive this.

For those who wish to learn to pray with sacred art, especially in the context of worship, freeing ourselves up to look at the art in the church or icon corner will help; knowing and understanding the texts and their chants, gives us the ability to sing along, so that we are less reliant on the missal and the psalter that will do this. I am not expecting memorization of the whole text of the liturgy, but we should start somewhere if we haven’t already. The more we can do this, starting with those that are repeated most often, I suggest, the freer we will be.

Authentic liturgical art induces right prayer when we take the trouble to look at it during our worship. Currently, in my observation, (thinking now of the pious and orthodox) there is very little engagement with art beyond devotional prayer, and so it becomes too much an internalized, introspective cerebral activity. This contemplative aspect should be there too, make no mistake, but it should not dominate to the degree that it does. I had these same thoughts in mind with recent postings about baroque art in the Latin Mass and the placement of choirs in the church.

In my opinion, the damage to our culture and our faith through this lack of engagement of the whole person cannot be underestimated. The prospects of cultural renewal are greatly diminished without it, and in my reading of history, this may well have been what caused the dislocation between the culture of faith and contemporary culture that Benedict XVI describes as taking place in the early 19th century, in his book the Spirit of the Liturgy.

I am currently attempting to put this into practice myself. Rote learning is a very difficult process for me - especially as I am now in my late 50s - but I am doing my best. I sing repeatedly the texts of the liturgy so that I can look at my icon corner as I do so. I have set myself the target of learning by heart  the chants of oft-repeated liturgical passages, the hymns, psalms, canticles, prayers and so on.

For a man to start doing this in his late 50s is a difficult task. If I had been given the chance in my first 10 years of life, the riches that it would have given me would have been great. Still, I am where I am...back to the Gloria and the Benedictus!

Christ Becomes the Mystagogical Catechist through the Mass

Book review: A Devotional Journey into the Mass - How Mass Can Become A Time of Grace, Nourishment, and Devotion, by Christopher Carstens (pub. Sophia Institute Press).

In this book (available here), Christopher Carstens, who is also the editor of Adoremus Bulletin, takes us through each key element of the Mass, from entering the church through to our response to the dismissal). Grounding his discussion in the sacramental thought of Romano Guardini, he takes us on a journey into the heart of the liturgy which, in the principles he articulates, is applicable to the Ordinary Form, the Extraordinary Form, and the Anglican Ordinariate form of the Roman Rite. (Sophia Institute Press also very kindly provides a free printable summary of the major points in two pages, available here.)

“If you’re unhappy because the Mass has become for you routine – or even boring and tedious – these pages are for you. They teach you eight simple ways to make your every Mass a joyful time of piety and intense devotion.” This is how the publisher describes the appeal of this book. I would add to this that Carsten’s approach is the basis for a mystagogical catechesis that will allow us to participate, so that the Sacred Liturgy as a whole itself becomes the primary force for continual mystagogy. As such, I would see it as a natural complement to any authentic Catholic education, such as described in the book on children’s education I reviewed recently, Educating in Christ.

By emphasizing the sacramental nature of the Mass so profoundly and in such simple and clear language, and by showing its deep connection to Scripture and salvation history, it is, in my opinion, a foundational text for an approach to mystagogical catechesis that could reap rewards for a lifetime.

I appreciated particularly, for example, his emphasis also on lectio divina as a preparation for the Scripture that is proclaimed in the readings at Mass. Firstly, he de-mystifies it with simple and clear instructions on the method. Secondly, and just as importantly, he highlights how this exercise in meditation and contemplative prayer is consummated in the worship of God. It is not a higher activity, but one which, like all other activities that are not liturgical, derives its power and effectiveness from the liturgy, and so, in turn, leads us back to it for its consummation. To help us, Carstens explains beautifully how our personal pilgrimages are a participation in that which takes place in the story of salvation history, running through Old and New Testaments. This is a useful point for the evangelization of New-Agers and non-Christians who are looking to Eastern religions in a search for mystery. I would say that their desire to meditate is good, but will be even more powerful and effective if transformed to be harmony with its true place in the spiritual life.

I was gratified to read how strongly he makes the point that this is not just about the words. All art and even the architecture of the church building must reveal these universal truths in such a way that they are communicated to each person, and so act as clear perceptible signposts that direct us on our way. To the degree that we respond to what is offered, we can ourselves be formed as artists who then fashion our very lives to the template of the Paschal Mystery.

To take one example of how images can support this: some will remember my discussion on why the image of the three children in the fiery furnace in the book of Daniel is important for Christians. Through this book, Carstens enriched my own understanding and appreciation of this image even further with his detailed discussion of the Scriptural account of this episode, and its importance to the Mass. As he tells us, “its message, as well as its central text (Daniel 3, 39-40), is present at every Mass during the preparation of the altar and its gifts. This is truly right and just because the three youths exemplify the only true way for the Church to prepare for the Eucharistic sacrifice.”

I enjoyed the following passage about the priesthood. “There are a few words that the Roman Rite uses to describe its priests and one of them is pontifex. In Latin the noun pons means bridge... and -fex is the foundation of today’s word factory, the place where things are built. Put the two words together - pontifex - and you get bridge-builder, which is precisely what a priest is; his role is to bridge the divide between God and man and pass over from earthly woes to heavenly blessings. Christ is the Pontifex Maximus. Even though he does not need our assistance in his saving work, He makes us sharers in His priesthood at baptism, empowering us to build the Paschal bridge with Him during the Eucharistic prayer.”

My hope is to be formed as one of many such supernatural bridge-builders who are capable of forming an edifice that spans the divide between the liturgy and the culture of faith, and then, between the culture of faith and the wider culture; and further, that the cuture of faith can become a channel of divine beauty, bringing it from its source out into world, so that grace might be reflected in all human activity and every artefact that results from it. However, none of us can play a part in this if we don’t first come in from the dark, and “pass over”, so to speak, that bridge called the “Paschal mystery“ which connects us to the wellspring of grace and beauty, Christ present in the Eucharist.

Order the book here.

Christopher Carstens is the editor of the Adoremus Bulletin and one of the Liturgy Guys (along with Denis McNamara and Jesse Weiler) who create regular podcasts for the Liturgical Institute at Mundelein. He is also on the faculty of Pontifex University, for whom he has created an online class on the meaning of the Mass as part of the Master of Sacred Arts program.

A Template for A Liturgically-Oriented General Catholic Education for Children

Book review: Educating in Christ: A Practical Handbook for Developing the Catholic Faith from Childhood to Adolescence For Parents, Teachers, Catechists and School Administrators, by Gerard O’Shea

This wonderful book, available from Angelico press, describes the principles for teaching methods and curriculum design for young children up to adolescence.

The author is Professor of Religious Education at the University of Notre Dame, Sydney, Australia, and the recommendations of the back cover, which I reproduce below, include two from fellow Australians who will be known to NLM readers: Bishop Peter Elliot, and Tracey Rowland.

What delighted me particularly is that Prof. O’Shea is offering something that is deeper and more profound that the usual recommendation of a classical-curriculum, Great-Books or liberal-arts education. For all the nobility of what is taught and read, these can still represent what is essentially a secular education.

In this book, he describes the basis of a uniquely Catholic approach to education that seeks to take students beyond the simple absorption of the material taught in the classrom, and lead them to a supernatural transformation in Christ. As such, and unusually, it is true to what the Church is asking for from our educators. Take for example, St Pius X in Divini Illius Magistri, who tells us that the goal of a Catholic education is the formation of “the supernatural man who thinks, judges and acts constantly and consistently in accordance with right reason illumined by the supernatural light of the example and teaching of Christ.”

We are given precise details and concrete measures that are easily followed. Balancing the natural and the supernatural, the theoretical and the practical, and combining the best of traditional methods with modern educational theory and psychology (with great prudence), O’Shea describes how a mystagogical catechesis, rooted in the study of scripture and the actual worship of God, is at the heart of every Catholic education. Then he describes how teaching methods and curricula should reflect these principles for children of different ages.

Another reason for my particular interest in this book is that it provides a basis for the incorporation of the Way of Beauty into education at levels below tertiary education (which is the focus of my book The Way of Beauty). From time to time, parents do ask me about this; now I know where to send them. O’Shea’s focus is more on general education than mine, but he provides a broad educational framework that will nurture the pursuit of creative arts in the way I think ought to be done, because it is based upon the same philosophy of education.

Below you will find the summary of the book from the publisher, and recommendations from the back cover:

EDUCATING IN CHRIST covers the essential practical and theoretical elements of religious education and catechetics for parents, catechists, teachers, and Catholic school administrators. The first part of the book responds to contemporary calls from the Popes for a religious education based upon authentic Christian anthropology. It provides a comprehensive outline of religious developmental stages, indicating activities appropriate for each of these from age three years to adolescence. It also takes into account the call of recent Church documents to approach this task from a “mystagogical” angle, linking the sacraments with the scriptures. In the second part, the best of contemporary teaching practices are linked with sound Montessori principles and the Catholic understanding of a pedagogy of God. Busy Catholic school administrators will find the provided summary of Catholic teaching on education since Vatican II a very useful reference tool. Teachers and home-schooling parents will find the sections on classroom methods, and the curriculum outline based on the liturgical year, especially helpful.

“In anxious times, this practical book is good news for parents, teachers, and catechists who introduce Catholic faith and morals to children and young people. The author offers a way forward that is Trinitarian, Christ-centered, and yet fully attentive to the needs of the child.”
— MOST REV. PETER J. ELLIOTT, Auxiliary Bishop, Catholic Archdiocese of Melbourne.

“If you regard the objective of religious education as the formation of a Catholic heart, memory, intellect, and imagination, then you will consider Educating in Christ an indispensable text. Drawing on ideas from Maria Montessori and Sofia Cavalletti, it explains how to hand on the faith at different stages of a child’s development. Every Catholic teacher should read and apply it.”
— TRACEY ROWLAND, University of Notre Dame, Australia

“Rooted in the Church’s sacramental traditions, informed by classical virtue theory, and drawing upon the best of modern developmental psychology, Gerard O’Shea’s work is a gem. I heartily recommend this practical, credible, orthodox, organized, and hopeful guide to educating our children in the faith.”
— RYAN N. S. TOPPING, Newman Theological College, Edmonton

“This masterful work is a much needed addition to the literature of Catholic religious education. It offers an integrated vision, bringing together anthropology, curriculum guidance, questions of school ethos and teacher formation, analyses of research findings in children’s learning—all grounded in a coherent and persuasive account of the aims and nature of Catholic education.”
— PETROC WILLEY, Franciscan University of Steubenville

“Educating in Christ has come out of the substantial educational and research experience of the author. It offers guidance to parents and teachers on all of the significant areas of religious education: Scripture, Sacraments, moral formation, doctrine, and prayer.”
— KEVIN WATSON, Acting Dean of Education, Sydney, University of Notre Dame, Australia

“Gerard O’Shea’s new book is an insightful and eminently useful guide for Catholic school teachers, catechists, and home-schooling parents. It provides not only insights into child development and its relationship to religious instruction, but offers practical, easy-to-follow lessons and applications for the teacher—a wonderful contribution to Catholic education.”
— MICHAEL MARTIN, author of The Incarnation of the Poetic Word

“Gerard O’Shea has written an extraordinary book that will serve catechists well in these challenging times. In language both insightful and accessible, Educating in Christ engages the question of how today’s religious education can lead people into communion with God. O’Shea answers by bringing the movement towards God in religious education into harmony with a reverence for the capacities and potentialities of those we teach.”
— JAMES PAULEY, Franciscan University of Steubenville

You can order the book here.