The Merits of a Franciscan Liberal Arts Education

In recognition of schools starting across the country this week, this essay is the second in a four-part series on liberal education.

Liberal education is inexplicable apart from the idea that some things are just good; not necessarily good for something, some useful or productive end, but good in themselves. In The Idea of a University, John Henry Newman offers the example of health. For a person to have a healthy body, of course, can be useful, but it is first good in itself. And we can say the same of the life of the soul and the mind. The cultivation of the mind, a necessary part of the flourishing of the human person, is just good.

The point of a liberal education is this cultivation, what Newman calls “the enlargement of the mind.” It is to the soul what health is to the body. We call this education “liberal” or “free” because it liberates those who receive it. Liberal education helps us to see the obnoxiousness and repugnance of slavery and any other evil institution that treats men and women as mere means to ends. It frees the mind from ignorance and error, frees it to function well and so arrive at the truth. And once we know the truth, we are free to do what is good, and to delight in what is beautiful. This communion with the true, the good, and the beautiful is the fulfillment of our nature. It is our flourishing, the full maturation of our soul, our happiness, and Newman’s “enlargement of the mind.”

This vision of liberal arts that I have tried to sketch here can be found in many schools—from grade schools to universities—both secular and religious. The explosion today in charter schools that are also classical academies is a wonderful example of such secular schools. I wish to make two further points. First, what difference would it make that a school is Christian and Catholic? And second, what difference would it make if a school is Franciscan?

Let’s take the first question first. For the Christian, certainly for the Catholic Christian, the point of every human life is to live in such a way as to become more and more like God and more and more like the Son of God. He made us in his image and saved us so that, through countless acts of love, we might gradually, act by act, take on the likeness to him. Our common calling, then, is not just to flourish, not just health in body and “enlargement” in mind; our common vocation is to become like God. To see the truth about the world as he sees it. To see ourselves as he sees us. To will the good as he wills it. To love each other as he loves us. To delight in the beautiful as he does. Thus, we can impose on liberal education a supernatural structure: the point of a Christian liberal education is to take on the mind of God and to be conformed to Christ, or at least to begin to do so, for such a project is endless. This means that a Christian liberal arts school will seek to impart to its students some measure of wisdom and holiness.

By necessity one can advance students—we can advance ourselves—only so far along the way of wisdom and holiness in this life. No curriculum, however large, could come to the end of this. Moreover, wisdom and knowledge are not the same. Surely and rightly, schools want students to know a lot, but there will always be fields of knowledge left untouched. Wisdom is about seeing relations and connections, about bringing disparate fields of knowledge to unity. The “subject-matter of all knowledge,” Newman writes in Idea, “‘is intimately united in itself,’ as being the acts and the work of the Creator.” He goes on to write:

Hence it is that the Sciences, into which our knowledge may be said to be cast, have multiplied bearing on one another, and an internal sympathy, and admit, or rather demand, comparison and adjustment. They complete, correct, balance each other.

In other words, to begin to take on the mind and heart of God is to see all things as one.

Further, a Catholic liberal arts formation cannot exist apart from the Church and her sacramental life; progress in Christian wisdom cannot exist apart from progress in Christian holiness, not only because the good and the true are convertible (and so enjoyed together, with one setting up the deeper possession of the other) but also because we are fallen and need the help of grace even to achieve goods and know truths that, were we not fallen, we would otherwise grasp. The vocation of all baptized Christians does not exist separately from the intellectual formation accomplished by a liberal arts education. They are not like the two parallel rails of a train track that never intersect. Rather, the Christian vocation common to us all takes liberal intellectual formation into itself. The former informs the latter, shapes it, orders it. Christianity has perfected the traditional liberal arts education that began in the Greco-Roman pagan world. But a profound consequence of this is we must rely on the institutional and sacramental structure of the Church. Teachers and students in a Catholic school need confession, Eucharist, adoration, contemplation—in short, the full panoply of indispensable aids that the Church gives us. We need these for our liberal intellectual formation, at least if the liberal intellectual formation is also to be Christian.

We come now to the final question: what does “Franciscan” add to “Catholic” when it comes to education? I take my answer to this question directly from St. Francis and St. Bonaventure. Let’s take Bonaventure first. As he neared the end of his life, he wrote On the Reduction of the Arts to Theology, an explanation of how the practice of all the arts is an imitation of the Trinity itself. In it, he framed the study of the arts not just as an imitation of God, but as an imitation of the God the Father. For Bonaventure, three simple truths drive all scriptural revelation and the whole economy of creation: God wishes to teach us “the eternal generation and incarnation of Christ, the pattern of human life, and the union of the soul with God.” The second and third follow from the first, so that truly the revelation of the Son in the incarnation casts everything in a new light, even creation itself. Bonaventure, going further than Newman does, sees creation as an image of the eternal generation of the Son. Thus, when we study the liberal arts, we take on not just the mind of the creator, but also the mind of the eternal Father, and all the arts are marked by a trinitarian structure. Any theist could hold what Newman holds about liberal education; but no theist could hold what Bonaventure holds unless he or she is also a Christian.

Bonaventure’s account of the arts includes not just the liberal arts but also the “mechanical arts.” For example, Bonaventure sees in the making, the “production” (egressum) of an artifact, a similitude with the generation and incarnation of the Word. Just as “no creature has proceeded from the most high Creator except through the eternal Word,” so “the work of art proceeds from the artisan according to a similitude that exists in the mind.” The artisan “produces an external work bearing the closest possible resemblance to the interior exemplar.” With the revelation of the Eternal Son, we can see with Bonaventure that the coming forth (egressum) of creation itself is an image of the Son’s eternal generation, and that the work of the artisan is similar to both.

I would like to contrast Bonaventure’s vision here with Newman’s. We can see in Newman a ranking of life’s pursuits. “Servile work”—“bodily labour, mechanical employement, and the like, in which the mind has little or no part”—is at the bottom, he explains in Idea of a University. Then would come professions in which the mind has a great part but whose activities are nonetheless ordered to goods beyond them and that justify their practice. Finally, at the top, are the liberal arts, which are ends in themselves, as we have seen.

Bonaventure’s trinitarian, theological vision makes us see this differently. Distinctions among the kinds of arts would remain, but they all are taken up and given a new, distinctively Christian meaning. All the arts, liberal and servile, make us like God the Father. Bonaventure gives us here a profound insight into the dignity of all the arts, liberal and professional, and a sense of their fundamental unity and compatibility.

I would like to finish these remarks on liberal education with St. Francis. When his brothers discovered that Brother Anthony was a very learned man—he had been an Augustinian monk before entering the Franciscans—and wanted him to teach them theology, Anthony refused to do so without the explicit permission of St. Francis, which came soon thereafter. Here is Francis’s entire letter to Anthony:

Brother Francis sends greetings to Brother Anthony, my Bishop. I am pleased that you teach sacred theology to the brothers providing that, as is contained in the Rule, you “do not extinguish the Spirit of prayer and devotion” during study of this kind.

A Franciscan education must not set at odds study and devotion, intellectual pursuits and prayer. And we have the constant example and warning of St. Francis. His poverty and his minority are a salutary reminder to us. One can become a great saint without education and a great sinner with it. If we combine our education with the spirit of poverty and minority—a perpetual sense that we have nothing, that has not been given us by the great and glorious God—we will never in pride inflate ourselves and extinguish the spirit of prayer and devotion that keeps our lives centered on Christ.

Truth must be ordered to love and to worship. As Bonaventure has written, “Knowledge puffs up; but charity builds up.” We don’t stop at learning the truth about the world and ourselves; we make this learning the occasion to praise, worship, and love God and the opportunity to serve and love our fellow man. Our highest act here is not the act of understanding but the act of worship, the act of liturgical love, which itself does not exclude our intellect but takes it up. The act of understanding the truth, in itself a good thing, is brought to fulfillment when it issues in love and devotion.

Just as grace builds on nature, the Christian life builds on liberal education. Grace does not ruin the mind or constrain the will; it does not abridge or truncate our natural activity; grace does not make a man not a man. Rather, remaining what it is, the mind is elevated by grace; remaining what we are, we become like God the Son, or, in turn, God the Father. If I may put it so bluntly and boldly—and to risk overstatement for the sake of emphasis—Newman’s understanding of liberal education seems more natural than supernatural, centered on God but not especially Christian—theistic, for sure, but not trinitarian.

We desperately need Newman, his power of expression and his clarity of vision—no one has so powerfully and so persuasively articulated the nature and necessity of a liberal education. But we also need Bonaventure, who reduces all the arts to theology, the whole range of human learning and practice to the imitation of the Father, everything to Christian love.

Image by Adrian Popescu and licensed via Adobe Stock.