Truths Worth Dying for: The Authority of Creation in Education and Life

Abstract

This article—addressed to students, parents, teachers, and administrators alike—argues that the close study of creation is not optional to any authentic form of education, most especially the Catholic Liberal Arts tradition. Such a study, however, must take our incarnational reality, and thus our sensory experience, as normative and primary. Modern secularism has stunted this fundamental mission of education by enforcing a mechanistic and materialistic ontology that has severed the bond between education and the love of wisdom. Drawing on Plato, Aristotle, and Aquinas, as well as twentieth century Catholic authors, the need to recognize the authority of creation in education, and the nature of that authority, is examined. Five lessons of a close study of nature are offered as features of the path from the knowledge and love of creatures to the knowledge and love of God. Ultimately, an authentic education cultivates goodness and love via wonder, contemplation, and self-gift in the teacher and the student, participating in the redemption of the world wrought by Christ through witness to His truth, goodness, and beauty in all things.

1. Introduction: To Make Men Good

In his eighty-eighth letter, Seneca inveighs against the notion that the Liberal Arts (studia liberalia) are able to “make men good” (Seneca 1920, p. 349). He mentions language, history, and poetry by name and asks if any of these “rids one of fear, roots out desire, or bridles the passions” (Seneca 1920, p. 351). No, “the liberal arts do not conduct the soul all the way to virtue, but merely set it going in that direction”. Rather, he says, it is Philosophy “that brings the soul to perfection” (Seneca 1920, p. 367). The ancients knew that everything hinged on love, and they saw no higher love than love of Wisdom. Two thousand years later, many of us sit in Catholic centers of learning, where not only has philosophy been added to the curriculum of the Liberal Arts but Theology too.1 Christ brought us his grace and strength in his Sacraments but, by bringing us into his life, has also called us to share in his self-sacrificial love, which must take the form of being willing to give one’s life. Clearly we still cannot claim that a Catholic institution makes men good, though that is certainly our aim. We have come to too deep of an understanding of the mystery of human freedom to make that claim. Solzhenitsyn, confronting many of the same political and moral questions as Seneca, penned a great truth when “it was disclosed” to him that, “the line separating good and evil passes… right through every human heart—and through all human hearts” (Solzhenitsyn 1975, p. 615).

Plato too seemed to think that men could be made good by bringing them up out of the cave to the knowledge of the Good: that “un-hypothetical first principle of everything” (Plato 1997, p. 1132), that radiant Sun which, upon its comprehension, man cannot help but love and desire for itself and by whose light he sees everything else.2 It is worth noting that Plato only founded his Academy after attempting to apply his political ideas in Syracuse where, presumably, men would be made good through the influence of a philosopher king. Disappointed and disillusioned by King Darius II, he returned to Athens where he would write his Republic. In it, Socrates concludes his discussion of the city in speech by observing that it did not matter whether this city ever actually came into being, because “there is a model of it in heaven, for anyone who wants to look at it and to make himself its citizen” (Plato 1997, p. 1199).3

Aristotle, seeking a more accessible starting point for philosophy than the Form of the Good, referred to the principle of non-contradiction as “the most certain principle of all” and “the best known… and non-hypothetical” principle, and yet he still found opposition from skeptics who wished to deny him even this simple axiom (Aristotle 1995, pp. 1587–88).4 Though the principle of non-contradiction seems to be a purely logical axiom, unrelated to the question of the Good, Aristotle would point out that, even if they denied the truth of this principle in word, they would never do so in deed: each of them would always prefer to walk around a ditch than to fall into it.5 What he was pointing out was that, though the mind is free to deceive itself, the Good that Socrates gave witness to was not merely an immaterial ideal but was, in fact, en-mattered in the world, incarnate in reality in a way that is fundamentally attested to by our own natural membership in it and dependance on it. As Christians, we ought to understand with even greater clarity that though goodness can be denied, the Good is inescapable, for everything is made good (even the mosquito, as Augustine6 often marveled). Crucially, as goodness is escapable, so too is desire—eros—that “ancient flame” described by Vergil7 and later transformed by Dante according to Christ.8 However, as Aristotle was acutely aware, there has always been a grave distinction between the good and the apparent good and man would only have two options: to follow his own desires and his own impressions of goodness or to conform his mind humbly to that which “reason does not establish but only beholds”, namely, “the order of things in nature”, the normativity of created reality to which we belong (Aquinas 1993, p. 1). Thus, we would do well to turn our gaze towards the author of reality, God, Creator of Heaven and Earth.

2. The Authority of Creation

The author of Creation has ultimate authority over reality, but we often fail to comprehend what this means. All attempts to understand how God can “permit” (by his “passive will”) the deepest miseries of human life must pass tenuously over this terrain. In the modern secular world, authority has become a synonym for power just as authoritarianism has become a synonym for totalitarianism, but it was not always so. “Authority” is derived from augere, “to make grow”, while the Old-English “auctor” designated a creator, originator, or source.9 Power, potestas, is something entirely distinct. In the words of Michael Hanby, “Authority possesses no extrinsic force; it can compel only intrinsically, by evoking recognition and love, by eliciting the willing surrender to its evidence” (Hanby 2020). The exercise of power—in the form of force or any other coercion—to compel obedience is a sure sign that authority has failed. This is why, for example, a “forced” conversion is an impossibility. True authority can only compel by its own self-evidence; it cannot “defend” itself.

Naturally, it is in this way that the Creator of the universe holds all authority over it. Through the creation of all individual creatures, he graciously delegates his authority, investing them with the responsibility of living out their essences and mediating the reality of his Truth, Goodness, and Beauty, all the way down to the simplest of creatures. Creatures are not the machines nor the automata that Descartes imagined them to be.10 Rather, receiving the gifts of their existence and their essence simultaneously, each creature is a “contracted presentation of Infinite Being” (M. Taylor 2019, p. 552) and the recipient of “the uniqueness and fruitfulness of its own self-being” (Oster 2010, p. 680). Aristotle had already asserted this in the ancient world when he stated that “a substance does not belong to anything but to itself” (Aristotle 1995, p. 1643). This is precisely what J.R.R. Tolkien helps us to understand through the authority of Tom Bombadil in The Lord of the Rings, who is described as “the Master of wood and water and hill”. However, contrary to our modern intuitions, when Frodo asks Goldberry if that means that all the surrounding land belongs to him, the answer is based on a different and older notion of dominion: “No, indeed! That would be a burden…. Trees and herbs and all things that grow or live on the earth belong each to himself” (Tolkien 1994a, p. 135).

In this mysterious way, each creature is the recipient of the gift of its own existence, bearer of the traces of its source, and thus enmeshed in a web of relationality that can be considered to stand beside substance “as an equally primordial form of being” (Ratzinger 2004, p. 183). All this is, of course, an echo of the inner dynamism of the Trinity, for the first movement of God the Father, Creator of Heaven and Earth, is one of communicating his authority and his very being to the Word, his Son, by whom all creatures come to be, as John the Evangelist relates at the outset of his Gospel: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God. All things came into being through him, and without him not one thing came into being” (John 1:1–3).

Thus, Creation itself, as a theophany consisting in “words in the Word”11 and as that first book of Revelation, has always been authoritative. The foundational insight of Aristotle, that all knowledge comes through the senses, attests to this fact: he asserts early in his Metaphysics that the senses “give the most authoritative knowledge of particulars” (Aristotle 1995, p. 1553).12 Thus, for the entire classical tradition, the contemplation of metaphysical realities is the foundation upon which the other disciplines can be developed and studied, starting with logic, which is only established by reason upon beholding the order of reality.

However, precisely because Creation is truly authoritative in this way, it can compel in no other way than its own self-evidence. The entire tradition of philosophical inquiry, rightly considered, is the quest for comprehension of this self-evidence. Thus, even if everyone gave witness to the goodness of walking around the ditch rather than into it, as Aristotle observed, reality will not compel you to recognize the less obvious manifestations of its inherent order. In other words, the truth of Creation does not defend itself, for its kingdom is not of this world.13 As Paul pointed out in his letter to the Romans, the pagans were “without excuse”, for ever since the creation of the world God’s eternal power and deity “has been clearly perceived in the things that have been made” (Rom 1:20). The authority of nature was, to some extent, obvious to Aristotle and to virtually all pagan cultures. Following human reason and nature are necessary but not sufficient. They were in need of Revelation, but it was precisely by the attentive and humble beholding of Creation that they were prepared for it. Indeed, grace cannot perfect anything but nature.14

Charles Péguy once wrote, “Faith is obvious… To believe you just…need to look around” (Péguy 1996, p. 9). This is the experience of any believer, and especially when gazing upon the beauty of God’s unmarred creation. If the existence of a good Creator ought to be obvious to virtuous pagans and Christians alike, Revelation is clearly not a call to fideism, by which we would stubbornly hold—by faith alone—to beliefs that could not possibly be maintained without the denial of reason. Rather, Revelation is that by which everything else is illuminated and revealed as more reasonable. Thus, thanks to Revelation, the meaning we perceive in a sunrise or the coming of spring finds its fullest form. As we will see, it is the ability to “see the form” upon which the possibility of education will hinge (Balthasar 1983, p. 151).

3. A Crisis of Authority

So, what went wrong? In short, the West underwent a process of destroying its spiritual depth perception, losing sight of the authorship and authority of the Creator. For the sake of material progress, the West limited its focus to the empirical dimension of reality. In the words of Péguy, this was a self-inflicted “mystical disaster” (Péguy 2001, p. 97). At first it seemed that the religious dimension could be sustained apart from the materialism that was enveloping human life. However, as that materialism grew ever more attractive and promising, even “the god of the gaps” was less and less needed, and the transcendent dimension seemed to become entirely subjective, superfluous, and eventually at odds with “real progress”. This was achieved through the enforced metaphysical blindness of conflating making with knowing, nature with artifact, and ultimately the entire universe with a complex machine.

Metaphors can deeply impact the way we think about the world. At the root of Péguy’s mystical disaster is a lie concealed in a bad metaphor: nature is just a complex machine. Recent research determined that the alteration of one word—from “beast” to “virus”—in a paragraph about crime in a hypothetical city led to a thirty percent swing in responses from readers regarding their perceived proper remedy (Thibodeau and Boroditsky 2011). Those who read the “beast” text argued for stricter enforcement, while those who read the “virus” text argued for reform through education. And when asked why they suggested these courses of action, none of the responses made reference to the beast/virus metaphor used to describe crime. We are limited beings and often cannot understand the depths of reality, so we take shortcuts—we make equivalences, we pigeonhole, we simplify complexity by making. These metaphors can subconsciously shape the way we think about reality, with important consequences. Truly, the way we think predetermines what we are able to think.

Late Medieval clocks would often include the planets and the signs of the zodiac as well as the time of day in order to show man his place in the cosmos. But at the outset of the modern era, this simile soon became a metaphor which mutated into an equivalence. Descartes would go so far as to say that the only reason that we don’t look like machines is that the pieces are too small.15 It seems that he did not heed Aquinas’s warning when he said that: “The opinion is false of those who asserted that it made no difference to the truth of the faith what anyone holds about creatures, so long as one thinks rightly about God…. For error concerning creatures… spills over into false opinion about God, and takes men’s minds away from Him” (Aquinas 2001, p. 34).16

The clockwork universe was a powerful metaphor because it was simple and it helped people conceptualize certain aspects of their lives. And the more we surrounded ourselves with machines, the more we bought into it, and the more we believed in the Baconian aspiration of dominating nature once and for all. If nature is a machine, it can be understood, manipulated, mastered, and bent to our will. This was of the greatest concern to Tolkien who, after experiencing the technological horrors of the Battle of the Somme, depicted the enemies of the good as those who possess “a mind of metal and wheels” (Tolkien 1994b, p. 76) and “[break] a thing to find out what it is” (Tolkien 1994a, p. 272). They are those who are under the spell of the technocratic paradigm and who cannot distinguish science from scientism. In short, they see the natural world as a machine to which man relates as if he were not part of it.

Worth noting is the fact that even those postmodern thinkers who recognize and rightly reject this false paradigm inevitably fall into an equally mechanistic reductionism through their commitment to materialism: that of holism. Ecological holists would like to think of nature as an ecosystem best understood according to systems theory or cybernetics, rather than mechanics. While this addresses the question of relationality on its most superficial level, to the extent that the unity of the whole is a product of and is exhausted in its inner workings, it never escapes the closed world of empirical and materialistic causality and, therefore, meaning. A dynamic emergent cybernetic whole does not overcome mechanism but only veils it in complexity.

Theologically, the notion of a clockwork universe brought out another influential metaphor: that of God as a Great Architect or Clockmaker. It takes little reflection to realize that the Clockmaker is nowhere in his clock, and his clock doesn’t need him anymore! Thus, over the last four centuries, Deism would surreptitiously displace the sacramental and incarnational core of Christianity for many who called themselves Christian. Today one regularly hears of people—even Catholic teachers—who describe themselves as believing that God is “out there”, a common Deistic attribute just one step away from total irrelevance.17 Part and parcel with losing the transcendent sense of Creation was the invention of the secular realm: a world emptied of its ontological hierarchy and without any inherent order or authority of truth. Hanby describes it thus:

[T]he first moderns set themselves against a whole world: the symbolic cosmos of antiquity and the first Christian millennium; the order of universal reason, understood as an attempt to penetrate and contemplate the bottomless meaning of nature and being; God, whose logos, the Creator and measure of all things, is more interior to the world than the world is to itself; and the Church—preeminently the Roman Church—through whom his eternal action is extended into history.

(Hanby 2020)

Thomas Hobbes summed up this new modern reality dramatically: “Authority, not truth, makes law” (Hobbes 1668, p. 133).18 Notably, the definition of authority has completely dissolved into the acid bath of temporal power which, in the political sphere, has now become completely unmoored from truth and goodness. The supremacy of technology and politics was—and is—at hand. And in this context, within the secular kingdom, faith in any kind of Creator has lost its original meaning and is now just one option among many. The secular world is like a modern corporate bookstore in which those fragments of Catholicism that remain are probably in the back corner shoved between books on Zoroastrianism and Astrology. Even this sorry state of affairs is being replaced by the internet where everything we could possibly imagine is just a click away, everything except reality. The most radical change brought about by the scientistic revolution was not primarily to the way we think about science, but to the way we think, tout court.

4. Education as Formation in Love

It is no surprise that in this world of formless information “education” has come to mean little more than the transferal of data and the teaching of protocol in the STEM fields and/or the manipulation of power dynamics through indoctrination in ideologies. In both cases, education has become a technique, the former seeking to insert information into the minds of students, the latter seeking to captivate their hearts in a convoluted web of emotions and allegiances. On the one hand, true content is a necessary component of education but is not sufficient without being ordered by love towards the good, while, on the other, the ordering force of ideology devoid of truth renounces love in favor of mere desire.

Socrates understood that truth, in order to exercise its fullest authority, in order to be truly convincing, must not only be spoken but shown. In the end, he gave his life to attest to the truth of his teaching. This is the radical difference between the philosopher and the Sophist. Thus, to educate is not merely to point to, but to re-present, to embody the love of Wisdom and the form of the Good, the True, and the Beautiful not only with one’s words but in the form of one’s life.

From Socrates to Bob Dylan, the Western tradition has always understood that, knowingly or not, everyone must choose to love something. For the ancients there were two options: the Logos, as St. Justin Martyr would describe so eloquently, or one of a myriad of idolatries.19 There was no third. Yet, for reason to be binding, it had to be lived, it had to be said and shown, repeatedly. As Aristotle pointed out, though the philosopher and the Sophist could discourse on the same matters and even use the same arguments, the way to distinguish between them was ultimately their chosen form of life: in other words, what they love (cf. Aristotle 1995, p. 1586).20 Sophists loved the idols of money, honor, and power. Only the true philosopher loved wisdom alone, as this was why Socrates didn’t charge.21 As Balthasar put it, “the apparent duality connoted by the word philo-sophia,… could ultimately be resolved in a living unity—and would thus, in its own distinctive way, display the analogy of worldly being which is said to be identically ‘wisdom’ and ‘love’” (Balthasar 2000, p. 9).

But how are we to educate when students will rarely, if ever, even have the freedom to choose what they love? They arrive with many loves already inhabiting their hearts and minds and, for better or worse, they love what they take to be good, they love what seems to be good to them. And so we must ask, how can we free students to love the good, and ultimately, to love wisdom?

For better or worse, even the most disaffected student has some appreciation for the natural world, often quite a bit, and educators should take note. Who wouldn’t prefer some taste of natural beauty to staring at a PowerPoint presentation? The reality is that so many young people today, in rejection of the technocratic paradigm, seek solace in nature and are inspired by the likes of Thoreau and Christopher McCandless.22 To locate the object of one’s love beyond oneself is already a victory over the all-absorbing self, and there is a profound connection here between creation and wisdom, for “The Lord by wisdom founded the earth; by understanding he established the heavens” (Proverbs 3:19). From John we learn that it was through Christ that “all things came into being” (John 1:3). Thus, the path to authentic love of wisdom must necessarily pass through Creation. This is not an optional field trip that can be replaced with a book or a video. For love of wisdom is the love of Creation that seeks to know and love the Creator. Thus, one of the greatest challenges of Christian educators today is to help students to discover the Creator in the midst of his Creation. Christianity is a sacramental religion that cannot reject Creation or pretend to leave it behind in a gnostic flight from reality. Grace perfects nature, not those who flee from it. As Joseph Ratzinger warned almost a half-century ago, “Only if the being of creation is good… are humans at all redeemable. Only if the Redeemer is also Creator can he really be Redeemer. That is why the question of what we do is decided by the ground of what we are” (Ratzinger 1995, p. 100). Thus, he concludes, “We can win the future only if we do not lose creation.”

Wisdom begins in wonder, and natural wonder is both the prerequisite and antecedent to the metaphysical wonder that asks why there is something rather than nothing. Thus Creation is the proper ground for any authentic education. It is impossible to know or love truth, goodness, and beauty without knowing and loving them as they appear in the created world. If God’s presence does not appear more intimate to the things of Creation than they are to themselves, if nature is a mere backdrop, if living things don’t speak to us more than non-living things, if life is not a miracle, we are not free from the blindness of modernity. We still need to learn to see again and to wonder.

Wonder is the sign of intellectual health because wonder is the corresponding subjective experience to the objective reality of the superabundance of the intelligibility of Creation, of that first book of revelation that God is writing for us in every moment. Chesterton describes this superabundance as:

…an abyss of light, more blinding and unfathomable than any abyss of darkness; and it is the abyss of actuality, of existence, of the fact that things truly are, and that we ourselves are incredibly and sometimes almost incredulously real. It is the fundamental fact of being, as against not being; it is unthinkable, yet we cannot unthink it, though we may sometimes be unthinking about it; unthinking and especially unthanking.

(Chesterton 2008, p. 15)

Sadly, examples of this unthanking blindness to the form of beauty are ubiquitous in our daily lives. One can’t help but think of the story of Flannery O’Connor’s telephone lineman, who, upon witnessing the perfect display of one of her peacocks, blurted out, “Never saw such long ugly legs… I bet that rascal could outrun a bus” (O’Connor 1969, pp. 10–12). What can one do if the other is not struck by the beautiful? O’Connor summarized her attitude towards this kind of blindness saying, “Once or twice I have been asked what the peacock is ‘good for’—a question which gets no answer from me because it deserves none…” (O’Connor 1969, p. 12). The failure of the workman is not merely a kind of sensorial numbness but translates into an indifference to God, for the myriad ways in which God allows his beauty to be mediated to man through creation are each unique and unrepeatable revelations. Balthasar explains that the visible form of beauty “not only ‘points’ to an invisible, unfathomable mystery; form is the apparition of this mystery, and reveals it while, naturally, at the same time protecting and veiling it” (Balthasar 1983, p. 151).

Crucially, however, all visible forms are mediated to us by light, and so Chesterton expressed a crucial truth when he described reality as an abyss of light. Philosophers, theologians, and poets have meditated on its mystery for ages. Plato designates the sun as an allegory of the Good. Aristotle, among many other uses, describes the weakness of our intellect as like that of bats in daylight (cf. Aristotle 1995, p. 1570).23 Augustine speaks of the illumination of Christ, the divine teacher, as that which “presides over the mind itself from within” when we come to understand something truly (Augustine 1968, p. 51).24 Thomas, throughout his writings, uses the image of light to express both metaphysical and epistemological realities. In his Exposition of The Divine Names, he affirms that God “is of every beauty and yet ‘without beauty’, inasmuch as he ‘incomprehensibly and exceedingly’…pours out ‘being over all things’, shining over them” (Aquinas 2021, p. 303). The simultaneous gifts of beauty and being to each unique creature are analogous to the shining of light, while the knowledge of God’s beauty and being are only knowable to us through the physical shining of light on those creatures such that they can be seen and known by us. Thus, to see the world properly is to see it as it truly is, both in its substantiality by which it belongs to itself, and as it unceasingly points beyond itself to its source.

Gerard Manley Hopkins depicts this reality eloquently in his poem “As Kingfishers Catch Fire.” Light travelling through a void does not touch anything and is invisible. To come to know the light and to wonder at its source, a third is needed—a kingfisher, an unrepeatable creature—that can be illuminated. Thus, to see Creation rightly “is to see both the gift and the presence of the Giver in the gift” (M. D. Taylor 2025, p. 129). Add to this the luminous mystery of light’s warmth and life-sustaining qualities. Every edible thing on this earth is derived ultimately from light. One cannot love the Creator without loving the creature also, and I would venture to argue that those who love creatures also love the Creator, though perhaps unknowingly. All of this speaks to the necessity of a sustained contact with and contemplation of the created order for each person and within every educational proposal.

5. An Education in Creation

A reasonable approach to the study of nature is one mediated by sensory experience and by wonder rather than merely by textbooks and abstractions alone, that moves from the more known to the less known rather than starting with the cell as a factory, or worse, the mitochondria as “the powerhouse of the cell.”25 Such an education ought to be aimed at the knowledge of creatures so that they may be loved, and with them, their Creator. Here I will present, albeit briefly, five fundamental lessons pertinent to a true, good, and beautiful education in Creation, all of which, it must not be forgotten, are a preparation and reinforcement for the proper interpretation of the Scripture and Tradition of the Church, and most fundamentally, the encounter with Christ, the Divine Teacher.

1. Nature is not a machine. Machines are artifacts, created by man for a specific purpose. Their functions and ends are determined extrinsically, by their maker. While even Aristotle will use the analogy of artifacts to help explain what nature is, today the analogy comes up perniciously short. Wendell Berry’s little book, Life is a Miracle, is an excellent introduction to the many ways in which this analogy has run amok, mutating into the technocratic paradigm that dominates Western society. In it he says of the nature-machine analogy that “When a metaphor is construed as an equation, it is out of control; when it is construed as an identity, it is preposterous. If we are to assume that our language means anything at all, then the world is not a machine, and neither is an organism” (Berry 2001, p. 46). Thus, in order to counter this ubiquitous error, we must seek to excise from our language all analogies that rely on mechanics or computers to describe natural realities. Nature, rather, describes an internal principle of motion or rest. This Aristotelian and Thomistic understanding addressed the formal and efficient causality within the natural order. The next addresses final causality, that is, teleology.

2. Nature acts for an end; it is purposeful. While this may seem obvious to every child, many adults have found this conclusion too burdensome and have preferred to explain everything essentially as a product of chance. While many scientists believe that, by this assertion, they are liberating nature from the “strictures” of theology, they are in fact condemning the study of nature to meaninglessness for, as Aristotle pointed out long ago, there is no science of chance because there can be no deeper cause to be sought beyond it. Chance is a real feature of the world enfolded within Creation that both Aquinas and Ratzinger agree is not excluded by Providence. However, as an ultimate explanation, it is not suitable because it prevents further inquiry, it’s a conversation-ender, and removes any semblance of meaningfulness from reality. Furthermore, before the evidence of the fine-tuning of the universe, random chance is simply not convincing. When speaking of the fundamental causes of things, Aristotle states succinctly that, “nor again could it be right to ascribe so great a matter to spontaneity and luck” (Aristotle 1995, p. 1557).26 It is for this reason that Robert Spaemann rightly points out that “naturalism and existential nihilism imply each other” (Spaemann 2005, p. 47). On the contrary, if there is purpose in the world, there is causality, there is room for inquiry, and there is some transcendent meaning that is the seed for endlessly fruitful contemplation. For Aristotle, it becomes apparent that every living thing possesses the ability for self-preservation, not as in end in itself, but for the sake of reproduction (“the production of another like itself”), which is also not an end in itself but “as far as its nature allows, it may partake in the eternal and divine. That is the goal towards which all things strive, that for the sake of which they do whatsoever their nature renders possible” (Aristotle 1995, p. 661).27 Thus, according to Aristotle, this participation, which is to live and to produce another being like oneself, is a kind of participation in the divine life and the telos of all living things.

3. Living things are fundamentally different from non-living things. Once again, though this is obvious to the smallest child, it is not obvious to materialists and all those who fail to understand the necessity of the primacy of actuality over potentiality. Suffice it to say that when we speak of something that is “merely material” or “purely physical” we are misrepresenting its nature. Anything that is, that participates in being, is being informed by some immaterial essence, whether it is wood or water, a butterfly or a boy. Even the simplest grain of sand manifests the unity that is informed from above with an essence that is actually receiving the gift of being in each moment. This unity is a transcendent wholeness that gathers the radiance of truth, goodness, and beauty into a single coherent light. Nothing can be said to be true, good, or beautiful if it is not first a being. This is decisive in the dismantling of the belief that more complex things can always be explained by breaking them into simpler components. While this is true in the case of mathematics and mechanics, there are realms of reality that are irreducible to these. A machine will still work if it is taken apart and put back together again; the same is not true for living things.28 Yet, modern science cannot grasp the difference between that which has its unity imposed from without, and that for whom unity is intrinsic and cannot be taken apart. The primary pro-life position is that life is different from non-life and superior to it.

4. Both Darwin and Descartes got souls wrong. Everything has an immaterial essence, which, in a living thing, is called a soul. While Darwinian materialism and Cartesian dualism seem at odds with each other, they find common cause in their opposition to a sacramental worldview. These errors underlie two erroneous notions about the creation of man. On the one hand, we get “merely material” evolution; on the other, we get a demiurge implanting souls into mechanized bodies amidst an otherwise soulless world. The first submerges man within nature while the second seems to create an infinite gap between man and nature, and yet both are united in their rejection of the connaturality of spirit and matter which defines Creation. While on one front, Darwinist materialists insist that there is no qualitative difference between humans and animals, the Cartesians are waiting for those who reject Darwinism to divorce themselves from the rest of creation, which they deem a mere heap of biological machinery. While against the Darwinists they affirm the uniqueness of everything human over everything animal (an affirmation that is not wrong in itself), they are tempted to ignore or downplay every sign of animal intelligence, intentionality, or emotion. Meanwhile, by dismissively describing these behaviors as mere instincts that animals are “programmed” to carry out, they open the way to the reduction of life to a mechanistic understanding of creation that will inevitably be applied to humans.

For Catholics, it is not the case that the human soul enters the body as something extrinsic, as a foreign second substance, nor is it the result of mechanical tinkering, still less a biological emergence. According to Ratzinger, “the rise of the spirit… cannot be excavated with a shovel” and “the theory of evolution does not invalidate the faith, nor does it corroborate it. But it does challenge the faith to understand itself more profoundly and, thus, to help man to understand himself and to become increasingly what he is: the being who is supposed to say Thou to God in eternity” (Ratzinger 2011, p. 142). In order to defend the uniqueness of man, we would do well to defend all living things as analogous to man, first and foremost that they have souls, not the same as, but analogous to our own.29 The Catholic doctrine of analogy—as laid down in the Fourth Lateran Council—is imperative here, for it allows us to describe a relationship of similarity within an ever-greater dissimilarity.30 And we must correct our language to reflect these analogous relations.31 Calling things by their right name, we see that the creatures to which God has granted life-giving souls are not so radically divided between each other as living things are divided from non-living, though even here we cannot forget that non-living things possess an immaterial essence. Man himself is not merely a radical, new creation but he also carries within himself the generative and sensitive attributes of his ontological siblings within his rational and spiritual soul.

5. Our eschatological vocation is relational, mediatory, and sacerdotal. This goes well beyond the question of what one learns in science class. With all of the above, the dignity of man as a “horizon” and “microcosm,” comes into view and his task as steward and mediator is clarified.32 Most profoundly, in Christ we see how the man who is the microcosm comes to serve not only as the steward of the cosmos but as mediator between all of Creation and God. As St. Pope John Paul II wrote, “The Incarnation of God the Son signifies the taking up into unity with God not only of human nature, but in this human nature, in a sense, of everything that is ‘flesh’: the whole of humanity, the entire visible and material world. The Incarnation, then, also has a cosmic significance” (John Paul II 1986, §50). Ultimately, this is the context within which we must understand the vocation of man in Creation, which will not be abandoned at the end of time but rather will become “a new heaven and a new earth” that shall be seen “coming down out of heaven from God” to dwell amongst us (Revelation 21:1). This will be the dynamic fulfilment of that which we are and experience in this life. The human person is relational to the core and modern atomistic individuality is a fiction that does not correspond to reality. Ratzinger wrote in his Introduction to Christianity that, “Christian faith is not based on the atomized individual but comes from the knowledge that there is no such thing as the mere individual, that, on the contrary, man is himself only when he is fitted into the whole: into mankind, into history, into the cosmos, as is right and proper for a being who is ‘spirit in body’” (Ratzinger 2004, p. 245). When we are rightly ordered to Creation, Darwinian rivalry fades and the supremacy of symbiosis throughout nature is understood to find its culmination in the human community where the good of the other is discovered as a good for oneself in reciprocal flourishing, and personal fulfillment is found only through loving self-donation in imitation of the Trinity. This is why it was Christians who invented hospitals, orphanages, soup kitchens—even Arbor Day.33

As a final word in this brief presentation, it is worth sharing Aquinas’ threefold path to wisdom. In his Exposition of the Divine Names, commenting on the words of Pseudo-Dionysius, Aquinas lays down the path we must climb, from creatures to the Creator. It is worth quoting at length:

From the order of the universe, as by a certain “road and by an order”, “we climb” by understanding (“according to” our “ability”) to God, who “is above all things”; and [we do] this in three ways: first and principally “by way of the removal” “of all things”, namely, inasmuch as none of the things which we see in the order of creatures do we judge to be God or fitting to God; and second, by way of excess: for we do not remove from God the perfections of creatures (such as life, wisdom, and the like) because of a defect in God, but because he exceeds every perfection of any creature, for which reason we remove wisdom from him, because he exceeds all wisdom; third, by the causality of all things, insofar as we consider that whatever is in creatures proceeds from God as from a cause. So, then, our knowledge is disposed in a way that is contrary to God’s knowledge, for God knows creatures by his nature, but we [know] God by [his] creatures.

(Aquinas 2021, p. 336)34

6. Conclusions: Education as Testimony

I would argue that Seneca simultaneously overestimates the power of philosophy alone and underestimates the value of the Liberal Arts because he failed to appreciate the mystery that is human freedom. On the one hand, not even sacramental grace can oblige a man to be good. On the other, to choose those studies that are pursued solely as ends in and of themselves is to train one’s freedom in the pursuit of the good as discovered through the exploration and contemplation of the created world. Education is a paradox, for, at the end of the day, the student is the only director of his or her education; only the student can choose the path he or she shall take. Thus, education requires the student to be both resolute and docile to authority, like the Centurion (cf. Matthew 8:5–10). Ultimately, the success of educators is not in their own hands, but their possibility of success depends on two factors: the truth, goodness, and beauty of the content of their teaching and the trust they engender in their students. Students choose, consciously or not, whom they are going to trust, who they believe will point them towards the good they should desire, the good that will not let them down. Even to hope to be an effective educator, you must prove to have the student’s good in mind; you must prove to be trustworthy, loving, and authoritative. You must witness to an authority that is not your own but that you can attest to through the actions of your everyday life.

This means that the most effective form of education is also the most dangerous. You may not be called to martyrdom but, if you truly love your students, your heart will be broken again because you will see many of them suffer and fall short of their potential and your own failings will be laid bare in the process. You must be willing to do this without becoming bitter or cynical, which is impossible without the love of Christ. And if you truly love the Good, your heart will also be broken because you will see it trampled and rejected. It will not defend itself, for its kingdom is not of this world (John 18:36).35 Yet, it does have a kingdom in “every human heart” that receives it and “all human hearts” are capable of sharing in its kingdom, but each must choose for itself. Thus, in this world, those who wish to teach must be willing to suffer. It is not the case that Christ was silent before Pilate’s query. To the question, “What is truth?” Christ answered in the most radical way possible: by laying down his life “so that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life” (John 3:16).

Every teacher must be prepared to give witness to the Truth, Goodness, and Beauty of Christ, of course, but this must be understood to extend to every place it is found, which, incidentally, is the whole of the created order—including the kingfisher and even the mosquito. To study the Liberal Arts is not just “to learn to think” or to take an “interdisciplinary” approach to becoming a well-rounded individual, apt for adaptation to most AI-resistant tasks. To study the Liberal Arts is to study the whole of reality precisely as a whole, from the position of a primordial clarity that all things come from one source and speak, not merely as signposts but as epiphanies, each in their unique voice, of the truth, goodness, and beauty of God. Thus, to teach the Liberal Arts is to live giving witness in hope with one’s whole life to the joy of the unity of wisdom and love, and thus, with one’s death also, until we may merrily meet in heaven.36