The love of God is the essential task of every moment of our lives. Loving God and working out our salvation with fear and trembling is hardly a task for which we must await payment. If a man labors out of love for God, he does not have to wait anxiously to see if his work will pay off. His work is paying off as he does it. If the field he has planted is destroyed by drought, or if the house he has built collapses, the man who has labored for the love of God will never look back on his years of labor and sigh over a meaningless life. The love of God is the meaning of his life. The point of planting the field was not planting the field. The point of building the house was not building the house. The point of eating the Eucharist is not to quell hunger. The field is planted so a man might know God in the planting.”

Joshua Gibbs
How to Be Unlucky: Reflections on the Pursuit of Virtue (Concord, NC: Circe Institute, 2018), 235

Josef Pieper on True Teaching

“Teaching in the real sense takes place only when the hearer is reached–not by dint of some personal magnetism or verbal magic, but rather, when the truth of what is said reaches the hearer as truth. Real teaching takes place only when its ultimate result–which must be intended from the start–is achieved: when the hearer is ‘taught.’ And being taught is something else again from being carried away, and something else again from being dominated by another’s intellect. Being taught means to perceive that what the teacher has said is true and valid, and to perceive why this is so. Teaching therefore presupposes that the hearer is sought out where he is to be found.

Thus teaching implies proceeding from the existing position and disposition of the hearer. Nor can that position be determined abstractly in advance, or fixed once and for all; it must be located in its own historical context, determined concretely for what it is. The hearer’s counterarguments must be taken seriously and the elements of truth in them recognized–for aside from the products of feeblemindedness or intellectual gamesmanship, there are no entirely false opinions. The teacher, then, must proceed from what is valid in the opinions of the hearer to the fuller and purer truth as he, the teacher, understands it”

~ Josef Pieper, Guide to Thomas Aquinas, 32-33

Wisdom Is Vain Without Divine Love

St. Bonaventure begins his treatise on the mind’s ascension to God by warning the reader that curiosity without a love for God is dangerous. The reader must approach this journey by the “exercise of the affections more than the instruction of the mind” (Prologue, The Journey of the Mind to God).

He continues,

Wherefore, it is to groans of prayer through Christ Crucified, in Whose blood we are cleansed from the filth of vices, that I first of all invite the reader. Otherwise he may come to think that mere reading will suffice without fervor, speculation without devotion, investigation without admiration, observation without exultation, industry without piety, knowledge without love, understanding without humility, study without divine grace, the mirror without divinely inspired wisdom” (Prologue).

Bonaventure puts this essential truth another way a few sentences later,

The mirror of the external world put before them is of little or no avail unless the mirror of our soul has been cleansed and polished” (Prologue).

This view of education is markedly different from our current data-transfer model. Bonaventure’s invitation to learning is far more attractive, more desirable–and much more human.

John Calvin’s Prayer for Learning

David Calhoun’s excellent Knowing God and Ourselves begins with a prayer for learning from John Calvin. I plan to incorporate it into my medieval humanities course next year:

O Lord, you who are the fountain of all wisdom and learning…illumine my understanding, which of itself is blind, so that it may grasp the teaching that will be given to me; please strengthen my memory to be able to remember well, dispose my heart to receive what is taught willingly and with due eagerness, so that the opportunity you present to me may not be lost because of my ingratitude.
To do this, please pour out your Holy Spirit on me, the Spirit of all intelligence, truth, judgment, prudence, and teaching.

Grant that I may direct my study to the true purpose, which is to know you in our Lord Jesus Christ, to have full confidence of salvation and life in your grace alone, and to serve you rightly and purely, according to your pleasure.

Hear me, merciful Father, by our Lord Jesus Christ. Amen.

There is little doubt that education’s unofficial currency is love. To be more precise, its mission is to educe a love of the world–the kind of love without which there could be no world at all.”

Robert Pogue Harrison
Juvenescence (University of Chicago Press, 2016), 132

The constant, obvious flattery, contrary to all evidence, of the people around him had brought him to the point that he no longer saw his contradictions, no longer conformed his actions and words to reality, logic, or even simple common sense, but was fully convinced that all his orders, however senseless, unjust, and inconsistent with each other, became sensible, just, and consistent with each other only because he gave them.”

Leo Tolstoy
Hadji Murat (New York: Vintage Classics, 2009), 70
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Further the Flight in Me

It’s Easter, the Sunday of Sundays, and I bring you a George Herbert poem for meditation. The form and simplistic style of “Easter Wings” can encourage a quick reading, but don’t make this mistake. Herbert packs a lot of imagery and theology into this tiny package.

Easter Wings
by George Herbert

My tender age in sorrow did begine:
And still with sicknesses and shame
Thou didst so punish sinne,
That I became
Most thinne.
With thee
Let me combine,
And feel this day thy victorie:
For, if I imp my wing on thine,
Affliction shall advance the flight in me.

Lord, who createdst man in wealth and store,
Though foolishly he lost the same,
Decaying more and more,
Till he became
Most poore:
With thee
O let me rise
As larks, harmoniously,
And sing this day thy victories:
Then shall the fall further the flight in me.

Structure

This poem is an example of shaped verse, where the image formed by the lines helped communicate the meaning of the poem. In this case, the lines look like wings (if you tip your screen or your head to the side) and also like an hourglass, and both flight and time are important themes.

Further, the two stanzas parallel each other in their movement: the first stanza discusses the plight and prayer of the poet, the second stanza extends these themes to all of mankind.

Notice also how Herbert uses structure within each stanza. The first half of each stanza discusses how sin diminishes one’s being, culminating in the short lines, “Most thinne” and “Most poore”. The second half of each stanza Herbert uses two bird metaphors to petition Christ to restore our being, and the lines consequently grow in length.

Metaphors

The bird metaphors in this poem require some explanation. At the end of the first stanza, Herbert prays, “if I imp my wing on thine, / Affliction shall advance the flight in me” (ll. 19-20). The verb “to imp” refers to the falconry practice of ingrafting flight feathers from one bird into the wing of another to help it fly better. This metaphor helps illustrate what Paul means when he talks about Christ’s life becoming ours.

The bird metaphor in the second stanza mentions larks singing. The skylark Herbert has in mind sings as it spirals up into the air beyond the reach of unaided sight. Herbert uses this image to describe what decayed and shrunken mankind can do because of what Christ has done on Easter.