The Sage and the Saint
Wisdom and Holiness in Education
by T. S. Eliot
Synaxis of the 70 Holy ApostlesAnno Domini 2020, January 4
MY DEAR OLDHAM,
My only justification for attempting to write about education in a Christian society is that no one else has so far done so. The problems of education in a secular society – but perhaps the right word is neither secular
nor pagan, but infidel
– have been dealt with again and again by those who can speak from vocation, knowledge, and experience; and some of the writers who speak with authority on these problems are men of strong Christian convictions. And the subject of religious instruction in schools, under contemporary conditions, is receiving a good deal of attention. My subject is education in a society which should be Christian in the sense and to the degree indicated in my book The Idea of a Christian Society. I was not there concerned with the means to be employed to bring such a society into existence; and I am not here concerned with the means of realizing a Christian education. Yet I maintain that it is well to have some notion of where we want to go before we arrange to start upon a journey; and, accordingly, while I am concerned with the end and not the means, I believe that our conception of the end should not be wholly without influence upon our action.
What Is Our End?
The lack of any clear notion of the end seems to me to impair much contemporary discussion of education. One error into which we may fall is that of assuming that our social framework is always going to be what it has been and elaborating our reforms within that frame: this might be described as an attempt to give our fathers and grandfathers a better education – and our fathers and grandfathers are no longer in need of any re-education that we could give them. The other mistake, and one to which in these times we are more prone, is to plan for a “changing world” – but on the assumption, that we all too readily make, that we have a pretty shrewd idea of what the changes are going to be. This form of gambling has the disadvantage that however the world changes – and I concede that our world is likely to change with great rapidity – a great deal of change will be unexpected, and some of it unrecognized when it comes. It is like cutting cloths for a child which is growing fast, but not at a steady rate and in regular proportions: the child will always be finding itself in a new suit which doesn’t fit, and which never will fit. All that we can say for such reforms is that, if they do not give us a better education, they will at least give us one which is not wrong in the same respects. Prudence advises us to restrict our reforms to patching and changing here and there, not committing ourselves to a desperate hazard on what the future is going to be like. But at the same time reason counsels us to avoid surrendering ourselves either to a present which is already past or to a future which is unknown, and to look below the surface of apparent fixity or inscrutable change in search of those educational values which can be regarded as permanent. We hear a good deal of “social philosophy” and of the “philosophy of education,” as well as of the “sociological attitude”: but if the philosophy is to be more than a philosophy of flux, it must endeavor to determine what are these permanent values.
The Essential Values
I suggest that the values which we most ignore, the recognition of which we most seldom find in writings on education, are those of Wisdom and Holiness, the values of the sage and of the saint. I have no need, in the Christian News-Letter, to attempt to define these terms; but it is as well to remind ourselves that there are innumerable people today to whom the terms would be meaningless if I defined them. In the East, and in pre-Christian Europe, the sage and the saint have been hardly distinguishable from each other. We must recognize the truth in both the Oriental and the Christian views. In the East, it must be remembered, the sage as the educated man at the highest stage – the sadhu, or mahatma, or whatever other word you use – was a person who had educated his emotions and sensibility, as well as his mind, by the most arduous application to study. The Christian West, on the other hand, while ready to recognize and to canonize the union of intellectual and spiritual excellence in one person (St. Thomas Aquinas and St. John of the Cross are two types of such union) has held a doctrine of divine grace unknown to the Orient, and has always recognized saintliness in the humble and unlearned as well. I believe, of course, that Christianity is right; but Christianity in its decayed forms could learn much from the East. For our tendency has been to identify wisdom with knowledge, saintliness with natural goodness, to minimize not only the operation of grace but self-training, to divorce holiness from education. Education has come to mean education of the mind only; and an education which is only of the mind – of the mind in its restricted sense – can lead to scholarship, to efficiency, to worldly achievement and to power, but not to wisdom.
What is known as “education for culture” and what is known as “character-building” are the atrophied vestiges of wisdom and holiness. In a Christian Society we should not educate primarily either for culture or for character; but culture and character might be by-products of our education, as technical efficiency would be incidental to it.
[...]
These considerations may seem to have taken me far afield from the main point of this letter – the affirmation of the end values of Christian education as wisdom and holiness. I hope that anyone who makes this comment at this point may be persuaded to read again what I have said, and give me the benefit of another hearing; for I feel confident that it is only in the light of these two values that what I have just been saying can be appreciated.
Yours sincerely,
T. S. Eliot.
*Originally published in The Christian News-Letter No. 20, March 13th, 1940, The Supplement; full original version titled "Education in a Christian Society."
**Full version available to Eighth Day Patrons and Pillars in the New Moot, one of EDI's premium membership blogs, includes the following sections before the concluding paragraph: Three Purposes of Education, What Type of Man?, Immediate Reforms, Opportunity for What?
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"What is it that has ordered the things of heaven and those of earth, the things which move through the air and those which move in the water; nay, rather the things which proceeded them: heaven and earth and the natures of fire and water? What is it that combined and arranged them...set them into motion and put them on their unceasing and unhindered course?..But who is the architect of these things? Or did not he who made them also bring them into being? We shall certainly not attribute such power to spontaneity." On the Orthodox Faith, Chapter 3 This comes after St. John of Damascus sets out to delineate between the created and the uncreated, a fact which, while at the core of existence, seems for him to be, for this very reason, the simplest to believe. Everything but God is created and, thus, susceptible to change. This means people, but this also means demons, angels, the rest of the created order across the entire cosmos. Everything is vulnerable to unrest. Except for God. If you have ever tried to explain the Holy Trinity to a child for the first time, maybe you have felt as I have the weightier, inexpressible side of God's unchangeability: how do I possibly communicate this essential fact to the person in front of me? (This is usually when my faint stutter starts to pop up again.) I like that here, like St. Patrick reaching for a three-leaf clover, St. John brings us back to earth to better understand the cosmos. Fire and water are no less mysteries than heaven and earth. And yet here we are, cooking and washing, eating and drinking, filled and sustained on what we can neither fully explain nor claim to have created. Only God is unchanging. Vice versa, God is the only constant we need. Maybe the rest is better left unsaid. LUKE TAYLOR GILSTRAP is Vice President of the Board of Directors for Eighth Day Institute. His poems have appeared in Spiritus, Ekstasis (Christianity Today), and Relief Journal, among others. He lives happily in Wichita, Kansas with his wife and three sons.
"Now, one who would speak or hear about God should know beyond any doubt that in what concerns theology and the Incarnation not all things are inexpressible and not all are capable of expression, and neither are all things unknowable nor are they all knowable. That which can be known is one thing, whereas that which can be said is another, just as it is one thing to speak and another to know. Furthermore, many of those things about God which are not clearly perceived cannot be fittingly described, so that we are obliged to express in human terms things which transcend the human order. Thus, for example, in speaking about God we attribute to Him sleep, anger, indifference, hands and feet, and the like." On the Orthodox Faith, Chapter 2 When I was studying Fiction in graduate school, one of the first methods I learned to really situate the reader in the story you were about to tell them was disorientation; if you wanted to ground them in one story, first you had pull the rug out from under their feet. So it's fitting that in the beginning of St. John Damascene's On the Orthodox Faith, before rebuilding our foundation, he first puts us squarely in limbo, seesawing back and forth between certainty and uncertainty. To paraphrase, there is no doubt (certainty) that about God some things can be expressed...but not all things (uncertainty). Some things about God are truly knowable (certainty), but some are unknowable (uncertainty). Oh, and while we're speaking about God (certainty), let's admit there's a gap, too, between what we say and what we know (uncertainty). My favorite line in this spiraling excerpt, "...it is one thing to speak, and another to know," takes me back to the final lines in Wendell Berry's poem, "How to Be a Poet," which he wrote primarily as a reminder to himself: Accept what comes from silence. Make the best you can of it. Of the little words that come out of the silence, like prayers prayed back to the one who prays, make a poem that does not disturb the silence from which it came. Wherever your preferences fall on the cataphatic or apophatic spectrum of theology (whether you lean more toward what we can say about God or what we cannot), Berry's poem, I think, would nod along with St. John: before we say too much, let our words be preserved by the silence from which they came. I'm thinking of the silence, that filling, restorative quiet I feel when I step into a cathedral or in some of my favorite moments with my kids in the early hours. Even before praying, can we hear the One already praying in us? Let's start there. LUKE TAYLOR GILSTRAP is Vice President of the Board of Directors for Eighth Day Institute. His poems have appeared in Spiritus, Ekstasis (Christianity Today), and Relief Journal, among others. He lives happily in Wichita, Kansas with his wife and three sons.
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