Then I stated the obvious: that if schools are going to contribute to that love of neighbor, they will need to replace the vacuous twaddle used to impose moral relativism on children with something richer: Latin.

Some folks wanted to know what Latin has to do with love of neighbor, so I found an example of a portion of what I am talking about. Here it is:

Haedus et Lupus

In a way, this is yet another false dichotomy modern thought seems to drive us into. If by utilitarian, you mean practical, the division is an illusion. If by Utilitarian you mean “based on the philosophical premises of Mill and his followers or the American variation expressed in James, Dewey, and others of the pragmatist and progressive schools, then the division is crucial.

In other words, if this is a philosophical argument, we need to go back to classical education. While if this is a practical argument, we need to go back to a mode of thinking that could see the unity of learning and practical benefits, which is, of course, a classical education.

But it does matter what we are talking about when we use the words classical education. Over the course of 2500 years, education in that tradition varied widely and its hard to pin down any core principles. There was one goal though: to cultivate wisdom and virtue in the students/disciples.

People who believe in the glory of being human don’t settle for anything less. People who don’t believe prepare us for a world that changes too fast for us to be prepared for it.

People who believe in the glory of being human note how we are unique: that awesome faculty of language; the ability to calculate, to measure, to perceive things with mathematical tools; the ability to hand on histories that enable development and intelligent adaptation; the capacity to test and perceive truth and then to embody it in sentences, poems, stories, works of art, musical compositions, gardens, and communities based (not on greed for money and/or power but) on a recognition of a common glory that draws us into a mutually beneficial harmony united by something or someone higher than ourselves.

People who believe in these things teach children how to read, write, and calculate using their reasoning faculties as well as their senses. They teach them the traditions that they feed on and that they owe to their posterity, including the stories that define them as a people. They teach them how to test assumptions with an eye, not to deconstruction, but to construction and even reform. They cultivate their capacity to remember, both alone and in community.

They link them to their heritage by preserving the languages in which that heritage stored its treasury.

They prepare them, not for the Quixotic quest to overthrow the world that is and to replace it with a world their conditioners use them to build, but for actual, practical, daily leadership in ways that heal where they can heal, guide where they can guide, and follow where they should follow.

In other words, they lay foundations for a lifetime of learning (that is to say, for pursuing wisdom) no matter what vocation they follow by teaching them how to use language and math, without which no community can ever be free and no individual can ever thrive. They teach them the natural sciences so they can learn and live in harmony with the world as it is. They teach them history so they can receive and hand on the treasury of their heritage. They teach them metaphysics rooted in the reality of truth so they are both bound by and set free by the truth. And they realize perfectly well that nothing can hold all this together except a transcendent realm of the true, the good, and the beautiful before which we must humble ourselves, as Plato, Aristotle, the apostle Paul, Augustine, Aquinas, Basil the Great, and everybody prior to the Utilitarians (with a few tentative exceptions) understood.

People with this form of education are the only practical people on earth, except those who tend a farm with loving devotion. They make good citizens. They make good employees. They make good families. They make good leaders. Have the utilitarian educators improved on that?

Over one thousand years later, our Lord is asked which of the commandments are greatest. He answers, “You shall love the Lord your God… and your neighbor as yourself.” In this context, being asked “Who is my neighbor?” he responds by telling the parable of The Good Samaritan.

The idea of the neighbor would seem important for more reasons than I have the ability to comprehend, but one thing that leaps out to me is that the neighbor is an actual “concrete reality”, not an abstraction like “the world”.

My family has been watching Mad Men lately, so I watched a couple of episodes over the weekend and it’s easy to see why the series is so compelling. By looking at the inner life of an advertising agency in the early 1960′s, it provides a perspective on issues and ideas that dominate the contemporary mind and politics.

We are living through a transition perhaps unlike anything since the western Roman Empire dissolved into the Germanic Kingdoms during the long fifth and sixth centuries (or at least since the Reformation of western Christianity in the 16th and 17th centuries). In a single blog post, one can only speak somewhat glibly about a matter of such global import, but let me state some of the more obvious points. World Wars One and Two, especially WWI, ended the European Enlightenment experiment, which was itself a turn from and largely a renunciation of the European Christian heritage.

Vincent van Gogh, 1890. Kröller-Müller Museum. The Good Samaritan (after Delacroix). (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

The effects in America were delayed, but the United States of 2012 are not the United States of 1963 (the year I was born), much less the United States of 1912.

When we think of World War II, we speak of things like “the greatest generation,” the great courage of the boys who conquered the Nazi war machine, and “Our Finest Hour.”

As is so often the case, however, while we won the war, I believe we have lost the peace. The ideas that gave rise to Mussolini in Italy, Hitler in Germany, and Stalin in Russia were complex and local. That is why Italy gave birth to fascists, Germany to National Socialists, and Russia to International Socialists.

But it is not hard to see the common root of all three philosophies: the will to power unleashed by a relativism rooted in opposition to religion and the constraints of the Western (Greek, Roman, Jewish, and Christian) perception of truth. More briefly: power, relativism, and secularism.

These ideas now dominate American thought and politics, though the will to power bears many disguises.

For teenagers and pre-adolescents it is called “love” and sung about with ever-increasing cynicism. For most people it is called “rights” of one sort or another. In every case, love and rights have been made social and political commodities used to barter in the marketplace of power. They are the coin of the realm, as it were.

The trouble is this: as “coin” they are paper money or, worse, electronic digits. They are so abstract that you can make them mean anything you want. Love is a euphemism for desire. Rights are a euphemism for power.

The neighbor, on the other hand, is a real person, located in a particular place, with particular needs, offering particular temptations. In the so-called Christian “worldview”, the neighbor is penultimate, our duty to love him second only to our duty to love God.

“The world” is just another abstraction. Only God is able to love the world. Do not believe for a moment that you “are the world.” You are not. You are a neighbor. You are one person able to love other people as you come in contact with them through words, mind, and body.

The more we try to change the world, the more harm we do. When we gain the wisdom to defend and run our corners of the world (meaning our kitchens, dining rooms, bedrooms, living rooms, and yards), then we might be able to bring that wisdom to our communities.

The Good Samaritan by Aimé Morot (1880) shows the Good Samaritan taking the injured man to the inn. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

When other people try to meddle as we seek to fulfill our duties to our household and community, we ought to tell them to go away. Part of governing is protecting. The world is full of meddlers known as experts.

The rise of the expert is part of the movement of thought I mentioned above, toward the will to power, relativism, and secularism. The habit of mind that sustains and is motivated by this contra-trinity of ideas is abstractionism.

Because the public sphere is dominated by people who deny any place to religion in the discussion of public matters, anything that once was included in and expressed by the religious life has been absorbed by the expert, who is a secularized priest.

At this point I am going to make an assertion that will trouble people. It troubles me too. I am going to argue that in a very deep sense we lost World War II. Not to the Axis military powers by any means, don’t get me wrong. Hitler, probably with a sense of Wagnerian fulfillment, committed suicide. Japan surrendered, broken and humiliated. Italy gave up.

But when our boys came home, they came home to, and brought with them, an America that was deeply altered. How could it not have been? We had just endured four years of the most horrifying war in the history of the human race, in terms of sheer unleashed destructive power. The boys who returned did not come home whole and the nation they returned to was not a whole nation.

The wild optimism of the 50′s disguised a terror that embodied itself in bomb shelters and air raid drills, and in what President Eisenhower called “the military-industrial complex,” which he warned us against with genuine fear.

Americans have always been a nomadic people, at least northerners. But after World War II the best words to describe America might well be “anxiety-driven nomads”. We were unmoored and didn’t have any idea where the port should be. Our minds were unhinged. Everybody either “loaded up the truck and… moved to Beverly” or wished they could.

Out in California (and Seattle, and Denver, and, eventually Phoenix, Albuquerque, etc.) we would build a new world on new principles of love and freedom.

Then came the sixties.

Even as a child I was amused by the arrogance of the 60′s generation (probably because I they were a few years older than I), but as the years have passed and I’ve listened with my mind to the lyrics of the era, I chuckle ironically. In 1963 or so, what the world needed “now, is love sweet love.” And for the first time in world history, a group of east coast boarding school young people who read beatnick poetry had discovered this secret and were ready to reveal it to the world.

I cannot imagine what it must have been like for parents of the 30′s, 40′s, and 50′s to try to raise children. Increasingly centralized control over the economy and the minds of children through schools and media created an anxiety the world probably had never seen before. If it had happened suddenly, it probably would have created a panic. Instead it created an intense vulnerability for parents who wanted their children not to have to

The Good Samaritan by Rembrandt (1630) shows the Good Samaritan making arrangements with the innkeeper. A later (1633) print by Rembrandt has a reversed and somewhat expanded version of the scene. Roland E. Fleischer and Susan C. Scott, Rembrandt, Rubens, and the Art of their Time: Recent perspectives, Pennsylvania State University Press, 1997, ISBN 0915773104, pp. 68-69. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

live through a depression and a global war.

No children had ever had so much power, in the form of money. It would be silly to suggest that they created their own music forms, but the people who ran the recording industries knew how to take advantage of their new power and to direct it to their desired ends. For a couple years, a battle took place over who would dominate pop music: the Pat Boone’s with their “wholesome” (though, I would argue, syrupy) music or the more radical Little Richards. Elvis settled that question by forging a quasi-compromise, singing wholesome songs and unleashing the sexual charisma in a bewildering succession.

By the 60′s, marketers and the music industry had created the “teenager” (a term coined by the recently departed Dick Clarke) and the teenager felt his power. The generation gap was invented as a permanent condition so everybody could try to adjust himself to it. Parents were pushed further out of their children’s lives (a process begun much earlier by the legally coercive common school movement of the early 20th century).

Many vulnerable parents were relieved. They didn’t know how to raise children anyway, having spent most of their own childhoods separated from their parents. So they turned to the experts and made Benjamin Spock a prophet for an age (and spawned an industry of “how to raise your child on the new principles of social management and modern irreligious child psychology). They turned their vulnerability into a virtue by concluding that they were better able to raise children because they had the latest teachings on parenting.

The children took the same approach to love. Only, instead of reading books, they listened to music. The Beatles began with cute, innocent songs, like “I want to hold your hand” (yeah, right). And while I remain an admirer of the extraordinary creativity and musical talent on display in the music of the Beatles and Paul McCartney’s solo work, I cannot deny that their vision of love left much to be desired.

It wasn’t long before rock and roll and pop music were working a revolution of their own – one long ago predicted by Nietzsche. The generation of the 60′s was drunk on revolution and high on saving the world. They were convinced that their generation had found the path to truth, which was merely a path laid out for them by John Dewey in their schools. It was a path to “your own truth”, to finding yourself through experimentation, through mindlessly rejecting the traditions of your parents and ancestors, and through rising above the limitations of your place to find yourself in a new universal place that is nowhere.

Perhaps that is the essence of John Lennon’s wistful ending to his strangely judgmentally sympathetic song: “Isn’t he a bit like me and you?”

Believing they were rejecting, but in fact merely absorbing more deeply, what their parents had handed on to them, the children of the 60′s made relativism their defining value. They were thoroughly debunked. They were ready to be conditioned.

America was “preserved,” – or at least found some ballast for a few decades, and only partially – by her “rednecks”, people not smart enough or schooled enough or high enough to realize that all they had to do to save the world was give more power to the government in DC. But an instinct to preserve disconnected from the wisdom that knows what and how to preserve is as vulnerable as the California teenager.

No society can survive relativism. Over the next couple decades we might experience the reaping of the whirlwind.

Perhaps we will see the face of our Lord soon. Perhaps He has ordained a time of great testing for us. Perhaps He is done with us (ie. American Christianity). Perhaps He will surprise us by granting repentance and renewal. There is no way to know what the future holds, because He is merciful. But if it were not for His mercy, it would be easy enough to predict: chaos, violence, breakdown, and tyranny. Same as always.

If He grants repentance, though, it won’t be abstract repentance and emotional remorse. It will be a return to love of neighbor as the valid expression of our love for God.

Really, this is my point: as a people and a nation, we have adopted a philosophy of life that is about love in the abstract, love as a word to stand in for my own passions and desires, love that is about the lover and not the beloved.

Loving our neighbors is not liking or feeling good about them. It is actively willing, not power for ourselves, but their blessedness. And our first neighbor is the one we covenant with to be faithful, “till death do us part.”

That is why the marriage is the bedrock of civilization and the family is the fundamental unit of freedom. It arises from a covenant that is a promise to “love your neighbor as yourself” and nothing else can lead to a flourishing society.

There are, contra the relativists who enabled Hitler and Mussolini to take over Germany and Italy and who are always the avante garde of tyranny, I say, there are permanent principles rooted in unchanging human nature. The command to love the neighbor is a command to be blessed and fruitful and happy. It is, in God, our only social hope. It is a law of nature.

If students read Latin texts in school instead of the swill we use to impose our relativistic morality on them, they would know that.

In a long-anticipated, shocking decision, the lower branches of the Supreme Court have questioned the constitutionality of the US Constitution.

“Everybody knows the constitution is about separating churches from states and states from citizens. If the constitution doesn’t uphold the UNESCO declaration of food rights, it’s obvious that the future ran out of gas in white-riddled 1950′s America,” the Times quoted the editor of the Places as incubating.

Not to be carried away, US News and World Investigations took the side of the people, contending that if the constitution is entirely consistent, then it has nothing to say to the world as it is. “When justices demand justice, you know they are obviously trying to impose their will,” chief editor Will Spine opined. “Oliver Wendell Holmes made it clear that power is for those who have it and anybody who tries to take it from them is working for the wrong side.”

Breathless crowds have gathered outside a small scale model of Tianenmen Square outside the White House, wondering if the toy tank will ever run over the GI Chao action figure or if instead the groceries will go bad. Most bets are on the food going bad.

The President expressed his willingness to set aside the constitution for the remainder of his term, arguing that his intelligence is so much greater than everybody else’s that only by using his newly created number system can all the waters of the world, including the rising tide of debt, be made to recede from the White House steps. “This constitution is just words,” he said, to riotous approval from the professors at Duke University’s English department. “If I could replace them with my numbers, we’d never have another inequality to deal with.”

He proceeded to demonstrate how his new number system eliminates the need to reverse the inequality when you multiply or divide both sides of the inequality by -1. When a journalist (J) from the UC Berkeley department of thinking asked how this eliminated the inequality, the President painstakingly showed J that he was sexist. There was a long silence while the audience waited for J’s reaction, but when he realized what the President meant the relief was salvageable. He immediately wrote a check to the president’s campaign in an amount he acknowledged with gratitude to be grossly unequal to his guilt.

The crowd applauded him, and congratulated him by granting him five free sessions of sensitivity training. Witnesses report that J spent at least 30 minutes gratefully licking the president’s boots, vowing never to read the constitution again.

At the heart of the controversy is the recognition that nobody has read the constitution in over two generations, since it was outlawed in the American schools for promoting violence and religion.

This post was originally published at The Gospel Coalition.

A funny thing happened as the 20th century came to a close. A number of Christians began to form what were being called “classical and Christian” schools. Believers who would have been (or were) involved in their local traditional Christian school or public school were suddenly making the case for Latin, reading the great books of the Western intellectual tradition, and talking about the traditional liberal arts—the trivium and the quadrivium.

That question, or one like it, is often asked of homeschoolers. Some parents find the responsibility of educating their own children so great and so intimidating that they can’t even contemplate it.

My answer to the question is “Yep! You bet I’m worried that I am going to blow it!”

But it’s not concerns over my children’s academics that keep me up at night. It’s that other awesome responsibility that I have. The one that God gave me the moment I became a mother. I’m a parent and that means that God has charged me to disciple my children and cultivate their souls. That’s the part that I’m worried I am going to blow.

And that’s why I homeschool.

My children were 6 and 4 when we began homeschooling almost 10 years ago. They attended preschool and kindergarten at a classical school where I taught. I felt good about the education they were receiving. But I didn’t feel so good about our frenzied lifestyle, so we returned home.

I confess it was a shock. I went from seeing my children very little—a rushed breakfast and an equally frantic dinner time, homework, bath and bed routine—and learning about them by reading notes from teachers to being with them all day long every day. And I discovered something: they were little sinners. They had character flaws and bad patterns of behavior that I had never seen. It was overwhelming, not to mention exhausting. I had to correct, and disciple, and instruct.

That’s when I realized that coming home was God’s gift to me. Being with my children in such an intimate and prolonged way allowed me to see into their hearts in a way that I never did when they were in school. Educating my children at home provided me with many—many—opportunities for discipleship and cultivation.  Opportunities that I would have missed if my children had been with some other teacher all day long.

Now, I am not saying that it is impossible to disciple your children if you don’t homeschool. Not at all. But I do think that the task is more difficult. A parent will have to work harder to find those teachable moments. And no doubt some parents do.

But if I am honest, I don’t think I would have been one of those parents. I was clueless when my kids were in school. They brought home good report cards. Their teachers liked them and praised them. And, frankly, that was good enough for me. I am grateful that it wasn’t good enough for God. He yanked me out of my complacency and put my children’s spiritual needs right in front of my face. Even I couldn’t miss it.

So, for me—and people like me—homeschooling makes us better parents by providing daily opportunities for discipleship. Does that scare me? Absolutely! Do I feel the weight of this awesome responsibility? All the time! Can I alleviate this responsibility by sending my kids to school? No!

A formal education is only one part of a child’s discipleship. Whether or not I put my son on a school bus in the morning does not change my duty as a mother. One day I will have to stand before God and give account. I doubt that He will much interested in SAT scores. And, yeah, that scares me.

Seeking advantage is good and honorable, as long as it minds its place. When it replaces the honorable as the ultimate value (as in theories like Pragmatism, Utilitarianism, Progressivism, etc. or in the common practices of the petty tyranny that runs our inner lives as well as the world around us), it becomes both dishonorable and self-deluding.

It becomes self-deluding because the human soul is created for honor and hungers for it like the body hungers for water. Nor is it dishonorable to do so. The question is not whether you should seek honor, but from whom you should seek it. As Jesus asked the Pharisees, “How can you believe when you seek the honor that comes from each other and not the honor that comes from God.”

The quest for honor is the soul’s yearning for the great well done. Our Lord suggests that we believe what we believe based on who we want to honor us, something important to remember when engaged in apologetics. But the utilitarian philosophies that run our political structures and our schools dishonor the quest for honor.

I describe these dual motives because I want to write about why we should study Latin and I’ve been struck by the extent to which its defenders have turned to utility and away from honor.

The argument of those who defend Latin on the basis of its utility is that this is what people care about. I wonder. Watch TV commercials. How many products advertise themselves for the practical advantages you gain from them and not for the honor you’ll get?

Perhaps that is because most product don’t offer any practical advantages (the great exception is power over others, such as sexuality and money) so they have to turn to the pettiest of honors. But let’s set that aside for a moment.

Promised practical benefits or utility are usually the solution to anxiety. I understand that parents are anxious about education. For the most part, we didn’t receive one growing up in spite of the years we spent in school, so we know the scam of schooling intuitively and we also know that in an ever-growing domain of life you have to perpetuate that scam to get a job. This makes us anxious.

But we are still told to be anxious for nothing and that only one thing is needful. Everything changes when we believe that. We are called to faith, not fear. We are called to be “more than conquerors” not timid. Educators speak of transforming our culture, but then we let the culture tell us how to teach. You can’t transform something by conforming to it. Here is one place where it is better to die than to surrender, even as a school.

Back to my point: why study Latin?

We can identify two categories for the reasons to do so, the honorable and the advantageous. These are not in conflict unless the advantageous rises up against the honorable.

For example, children should honor their parents because it is right to do so. That is, it is honorable. And yet, interestingly, this is the first commandment that includes a promise: that it may be well with you and you may inherit the land. In other words, if you do the honorable, you’ll gain advantages. This is not the product of a mechanism that turns inputs into outputs. It is the faithfulness of a promise-keeping God.

So why study Latin? You’ve already been told the advantages: improved language skills, SAT scores, understanding of grammar, college admissions, trained mind, look smart at cocktail parties, put down the big shot who doesn’t know it, etc. Good stuff all. Well, at least, mostly.

But I want to explore the reasons derived from thinking about the topic of honor. There are three, those oriented toward

1. Love of God

2. Love of Neighbor

3. Virtue

I’ll explore each over the next little while.

The key to a Christian conception of studies is the realization that prayer consists of attention. It is the orientation of all the attention of which the soul is capable toward God. The quality of the attention counts for much in the quality of the prayer. Warmth of heart cannot make up for it.

Simone Weil

Four years ago I read Simone Weil’s essay, “Reflections on the Right Use of School Studies with a View to the Love of God” from her classic Waiting for God.

Then in March I sat in on a Friday discussion at Gutenberg College where a young woman bought up Hayek’s essay “Security and Freedom.” She said she had been thinking about security and freedom in the context of public prayer, so we began to talk about public prayer. What is it? What is prayer?

Someone defined prayer as personal, intimate communication with God. Recalling Simone Weil’s essay, I asked if anyone had considered that the perfection of focused study might be prayer… and how does that work?

The dialogue led us to distinguish between meditation and prayer. Maybe meditation is didactic instruction, either to self or group, and prayer is communication with God.

Then we left it.

A few weeks ago I began reading Stratford Caldecott’s Beauty for Truth’s Sake, and because of it, I have returned to Waiting for God.

In his chapter “The Golden Circle,”  Caldecott writes this:

One twentieth-century writer who was adept at translating theology into geometry is Simone Weil, a skilled mathematician (and sister of one of the greatest mathematicians of the twentieth century) as well as a profound religious thinker. Among all those who have studied Pythagorean geometry, she more than any recognized that it is marked deeply by the Trinity, for its central idea is that of mediation (metaxu), which she identifies with the Logos (Son). p. 81

Again, Weil.

So pausing at that point, I turned from my desk to my bookshelf. I needed to return to “Reflections on the Right Use of School Studies with a View to the Love of God.” Pulling Waiting for God from my bookshelf has proven to be pure pleasure.

“Reflections on the Right Use of School Studies with a View to the Love of God” is much more than I remembered it to be, and like every excellent essay, every other line begs to be shared. Yet the most important point is this: the substance of prayer is the faculty of attention. The main goal of teachers and spiritual leaders ought to be the cultivation of the faculty of attention.

Although people seem to be unaware of it today, the development of the faculty of attention forms the real object and almost the sole interest of studies.

Weil writes that only the highest part of the attention makes contact with God; yet, at the same time, school exercises only develop a lower kind of attention. How then can school exercises help students make contact with God?

Weil argues that the efforts of genuine attention in school studies, even if they do not immediately bear fruit, will indeed bear eternal fruit. Sometimes the student will not arrive at the “right answer” at the end of his study, but the effort of truth-seeking promises to develop the faculty of attention, and the virtue will be found in prayer.

If we concentrate our attention on trying to solve a problem of geometry, and if at the end of an hour we are no nearer to doing so than at the beginning, we have nevertheless been making progress each minute of that hour in another more mysterious dimension. Without our knowing or feeling it, this apparently barren effort has brought more light into the soul. The result will one day be discovered in prayer.

As the student longs to discover the ideas embodied in his studies, so he seeks the eternal truths of God. Every truth-seeking effort cultivates the faculty of attention.

Never in any case whatever is a genuine effort of the attention wasted.”  Value exists in the wrestling, even without finding the “right answer.” The effort is not waste because its value is its virtue in the spiritual and intellectual realms of the student. The faculty of attention serves not only the intellectual, but also the spiritual; attending attends to both. Attending cultivates the intellectual realm across subjects. Studying geometry will help one see truth in poetry. Attending to astronomy aids one in perceiving all truth, and seeing truth is spiritual. And when the spirit apprehends truth, the spirit rejoices in pure pleasure.

The key, the turning point, is this pleasure that one receives. When we have tasted the joy of contemplation, we desire more. We hunger and thirst for the ideas of God. We long for truth – eternal, essential truth. As David Hicks notes in Norms and Nobility, engaging with ideas is “the natural motivation for scholarship—the excitement of making connections and of seeing the whole emerge from a relation of parts…” Contemplation is a natural reward and it will truly motivate students.

There is a real desire when there is an effort of attention. It is really light that is desired if all other incentives are absent. Even if our efforts of attention seem for years to be producing no result, one day a light that is in exact proportion to them will flood the soul. Every effort adds a little gold to a treasure no power on earth can take away.

Seek ye first the Logos. All treasures of wisdom and knowledge are hidden there. Lay up for yourselves treasures in heaven.

It is in prayer that the student meets an eternal logos and through attending, apprehends it, and through re-presenting it, names it and releases it back to eternity. In this way, cultivating the faculty of attention has more to do with the process than the product; however, developing the faculty of attention is, in the end, always practical.

The useless efforts made by the Cure d’ Ars, for long and painful years, in his attempt to learn Latin bore fruit in the marvelous discernment that enabled him to see the very soul of his penitents behind their words and even their silences.

The benefits of the virtue of attentive perception are both immediate and eternal.

How can teachers cultivate the faculty of attention in a student?

There are two conditions. First, the teacher must coach his student to never let the goal of prayer out of his sight. The teacher teaches the student to hold to the necessity of wishing to complete a work correctly, “because such a wish is indispensable in any true effort,” while keeping his eye on the idea, the logos.

Second, keeping in mind the virtue of humility, the teacher must tutor towards the unforgiving examination of failure.  The student must learn to look upon and  contemplate his mistakes, “trying to get down to the origin of each fault.”

Above all it is thus that we can acquire the virtue of humility, and that is a far more precious treasure than all academic progress. From this point of view it is perhaps even more useful to contemplate our stupidity than our sin. Consciousness of sin gives us the feeling that we are evil, and a kind of pride sometimes finds a place in it. When we force ourselves to fix the gaze, not only of our eyes but of our souls, upon a school exercise in which we have failed through sheer stupidity, a sense of our mediocrity is borne in upon us with irresistible evidence. No knowledge is more to be desired. If we can arrive at knowing this truth with all our souls we shall be well established on the right foundation.

Weil says that in order to fulfill the second condition, examining his mistakes, one must simply wish to do it, but the first condition, to really pay attention, requires the knowledge of how to set about it.

First, one must not confuse attention with will power. Will power is a muscular effort, an effort that has no place in study.  Drudgery creates fatigue, but attention does not cause weariness.

The will is not run by desire, but attention is encouraged by desire.

The intelligence can only be led by desire. For there to be desire, there must be pleasure and joy in the work. The intelligence only grows and bears fruit in joy. The joy of learning is as indispensable in study as breathing is in running. Where it is lacking there are no real students, but only poor caricatures of apprentices who, at the end of their apprenticeship, will not even have a trade.

The experience of joy is essential. Rejoicing in the impressions of God’s eternal idea(s), the student ambles along the sacred path, never rushing, always musing. Imagining, he does smile; he sings the while. Sweet joy befalls him. Real students are like innocent children, waiting in faith for a promised, beautiful blessing in a place where dignity meets delight.

Second, attention is not hasty; she is longsuffering. She waits. Patiently she opens and empties herself, “ready to receive in its naked truth the object that is to penetrate it.”

All wrong translations, all absurdities in geometry problems, all clumsiness of style, and all faulty connection of ideas in compositions and essays, all such things are due to the fact that thought has seized upon some idea too hastily, and being thus prematurely blocked, is not open to the truth.

Essential truths cannot be mastered; they must be waited upon; they will give of themselves only in their time. Every truth is like the truest of all truths, too refined to be kept in the lower realm. Each truth the student seeks belongs to a higher order, to the heavenly realm. The student must learn to wait for it; honoring one of truth’s essential elements, the faculty of free consent. “We do not obtain the most precious gifts by going in search of them but by waiting for them.”

Right answers are not the most precious gifts, but they reflect the most precious gift, “the very Truth that once in human voice declare: ‘I am the Truth.’”

Every school exercise, thought of in this way, is like a sacrament. In every school exercise there is a special way of waiting upon the truth, setting our hearts upon it, yet not allowing ourselves to go out in search of it.

So what is the main duty of teachers?

In order to teach the first condition of “aiming solely at increasing the power of attention with a view to prayer,” the teacher must teach toward ideas. Charlotte Mason writes, “our business is to give children the great ideas of life…” and the teacher must teach his students to wait. Aiming towards perceiving and incarnating ideas and learning to wait are what will bring students near to God, closer to his eternal truths.

To pray to God is to love him, and to love him is to love one’s neighbor.

Prayer, love of God, and love of neighbor have attention as their substance.

Recalling God’s truths is evidence of the love of God. In order to re-present an idea one must first have perceived the idea by allowing the idea to penetrate. The only way to perceive and allow an idea to penetrate is through cultivating the faculty of attention. Devoted to the art of attention, the perception, penetration, and apprehension of ideas, one can now love one’s neighbor. To love one’s neighbor is to see him. One sees his neighbor, waits upon his neighbor, the same way one sees and waits upon God’s eternal truths.

The effort of attending will pay off in the greater aptitude for grasping eternal truths and then expressing them. Attending helps us see and then speak. As Weil proclaims, maybe the kindest words we can speak to our neighbor are, “What are you going through?” It is this question which embodies a true longing to know our neighbor. To be known might be man’s greatest longing and to seek to know might be the greatest act of love.

No saccharine sentimentality exists in this act of love. The act of cultivating the faculty of attention is the act of cultivating the highest affection. To love God is to pray to him, and the substance of prayer is the faculty of attention.

Prayer is both meditation and communication. “Education, like faith, is the evidence of things not seen.” Prayer is the artifact of watching, waiting attention.

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Kim Jahn is a current CiRCE apprentice. She lives with her family in Rogue River, Oregon.

Religion comes from “re-ligio”, which is Latin for “tie together”. It’s a silly notion to suggest that we can be Christians without being religious in this precise use of the word. To do so implies that Christianity is just a part of your life that leaves other parts unaffected.

“Hic non potest.”

This cannot be. When God is accepted into the soul and when the person is accepted into God in Christ, everything is changed, though admittedly with a painful gradualness.

When the grace of God occupies a person’s thoughts, extraordinary things can happen -  even if that person doesn’t embrace the grace very much.

Here is an example of what I mean.

Laudate Dominum

Try this if that didn’t work:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=51u3QBYA2EA

The text is from Psalm 116, the music is by Mozart, and the breath that swells s it is the same one that breathed life into globs of earth in Genesis 2 and John 16.

Here is an interlinear translation of what they are singing:

Laudate Dominum omnes gentes,

Praise the Lord all nations

Laudate eum omnes populi.

Praise Him all peoples

Quoniam confirmata est super nos misericordia ejus,

For his mercy is confirmed upon us*

et veritas Domini manet in Aeternum

And the truth of the Lord shall remain into eternity

gloria patri et filio et spiritui sancto,

glory to the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit

sicut erat in principio et nunc semper et in saecula saecularum

as it was in the beginning, is now, always, and into the ages of the ages

Amen, amen.

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This could not have been composed in a culture that lacks a strong religious sensibility and that flees God instead of fearing Him.

“Panis enim dei est, qui de caelo descendit, et dat vitam mundo.” John 6 :33.

* This is a difficult line to translate. “confirmata est” seems to suggest that His mercy is “confirmed upon us” not in the sense that it is publicly acknowledged, but in that it continually and endlessly reaches us and that it always will. It is reliable, to reduce it to a partial explanation.