A talk at celebrations marking
150 years of the Dominican school at Köszeg, Hungary
12 October 2018
________________________
Saint Dominic’s intuition
To understand what the
specific characteristics of ‘Dominican education’ might be let us look firstly
to Saint Dominic himself to see how he engaged in the activities of learning
and teaching. Dominic’s life was turned upside down by the shock he experienced
when he encountered the Albigensian heresy in the south of France in the early
years of the 13th century. The Albigensian heresy was just one form
of a particular tendency that is always lurking around the boundaries of
Christianity, a tendency to spiritualise human and Christian life at the cost
of denigrating the physical and material world. In doing so this tendency
under-values and even despises the body, marriage and sexuality, dismisses the
Incarnation of the Son of God and Christ’s ongoing presence in the sacraments, rejects
the body which is the Church with its obvious limitations and illnesses as all
bodies are limited and prone to sickness.
So the first intuition
of Dominic is to defend the goodness of the physical creation, to show the coherence
of God’s plan of creation and redemption, and to convince people of the
reliability of nature and reason. This is a first characteristic of Dominican
education: trust in the intelligibility of nature and the reliability of
reason. If nature and reason are to be trusted because they come from the hands
of a loving God, then human beings too are to be trusted because they come from
the same hands and are destined to share the divine life in God’s eternal
kingdom. So a second key aspect of Dominican education is already clear:
Dominic trusted people, trusted the workings of thought and understanding in
them, trusted the movement of the Holy Spirit to enlighten and to strengthen all
who sincerely seek to know what is true.
Study, conversation, disputation
His own teaching
methods centred on shared study, conversation, and disputation. His project in
response to the heresy was, from the beginning, a communitarian one. A great
Dominican of a later generation, Albert the Great, spoke about the joy of
searching together for the truth. When Dominic sent his first disciples to the
university centres of Europe he sent them in the first place to study. From the
early sources we see in the first Dominicans a never-ending need and desire for
education. The first convents of the Order were all schools. Each one had its
professor or teacher, called a ‘lector’ or reader, whose lectures were attended
not only by people in the neighbourhood but by the friars of the convent who
were obliged to be permanent students. There is always more to be known and
understood about the world, about human life and experience, and about what God
has revealed.
We see Dominic in
conversation on many occasions. Famously, he spent a night in discussion with
an inn-keeper at Toulouse, arguing about the teachings of Albigensianism and
the orthodox teachings of the Church. With his bishop, Diego, he engaged in a
crucial conversation with Cistercian legates whom the Pope had asked to lead a
campaign of preaching against the heresy. Their work was failing and it was
failing because their methods was not in accordance with the gospel. They were relying on an impressive display of
wealth and power. Diego and Dominic saw that they needed to return to the
greatest of teachers, Jesus himself, and to remember his instructions for the
mission: it was to be undertaken in simplicity and poverty, in fraternity and
trust, in constant study and contemplation.
Dominic and his
companions engaged also in disputations, more formal and confrontational
conversations, in which the arguments of each side were put to various tests,
not least the test of public opinion. Sometimes these disputations went well
for the new band of preachers and sometimes they did not go so well. But the
way forward was clear: a renewed preaching of the gospel, a new evangelisation
if you like, in which the tasks of study and preaching were undertaken in a
common life of prayer and contemplation.
Thomas Aquinas following Dominic
It has sometimes been
pointed out that the mission of great charismatic saints of the Church has
often been supported by another great figure whose task is to give
philosophical and theological expression to the insights and intuitions of the
charismatic person. Pope Benedict XVI spoke of this many years ago pointing to
examples like Antony of Egypt and Athanasius of Alexandria who wrote Antony’s
life, Francis of Assisi and Bonaventure, and in the case of the Dominicans,
Dominic and Thomas Aquinas.
When reflecting on
‘Dominican education’ it is tempting to begin (and perhaps to end!) with Thomas
but I think it is essential to turn first to Dominic, to recall the original
and originating insights that gave rise to the Order which Thomas was later so determined
to join. Thomas saw something of great importance in the life and mission of
the preaching friars and he put his own extraordinary gifts at the service of
that life and mission. In the words of Damian Byrne, Master of the Order, ‘it
was the genius of Thomas Aquinas to carry forward Dominic’s fundamental
orientation and to broaden the basis of theological education in the Order
through his study of Aristotelian philosophy, which enabled him to give an
intellectual foundation to the theology of the goodness of creation and the
rejection of dualism’ (The Role of Study
in the Order, Letter of 25 May 1991).
Thomas on teaching
When Thomas speaks
about teaching in his Summa theologiae
he does it at a point in the work that may seem surprising. He considers it
when he is speaking about ways in which some creatures can share with God the
work of guiding creation. Within the creation there are creatures that are
intelligent and free, made in the image and likeness of God, and so capable of
understanding truth, of choosing goodness and of appreciating beauty. The human
being is one such creature (the others are the angels). Education normally
means the process by which some human beings teach other human beings, sharing
knowledge with them, assisting them in understanding and helping them to put
this knowledge and understanding at the service of human development.
For Thomas the work of
the teacher is analogous to that of the medical doctor. Just as the doctor
cannot do the body’s healing for it but can assist, from outside, through the
remedies and practices that she can recommend, so the teacher cannot do a
student’s understanding for him or her, but can assist, from outside, through
the various skills and practices that are involved in pedagogy. For some things
we do not need teachers, Thomas says, because we find them out for ourselves.
But for other things we need help, people who will point us to sources of
information, who will explain to us how to understand things, who will if
necessary show us how to do things.
As in all his work
there is in Thomas’s account of education a deep respect for the dignity and
capacity of the individual human person. Teaching and learning involve real
work and are creative in bringing about in the world things that did not exist
before. Education is not just the unveiling of what has always been there. Nor
is it a kind of ‘plugging in’ to some common store of knowledge, opening a kind
of channel along which knowledge can flow. Learning and teaching are much
richer activities which bring about real changes in the world and so they
belong to the creature made in the image and likeness of God. That creature has
capacities not only of understanding and freedom but also of initiative and
creativity. Many teachers will say that their greatest joy is to see students
going beyond anything that they themselves have achieved, growing beyond them
in knowledge and understanding, and contributing new things to the world
through their gifts and inventiveness. Where has it come from? It is the
student’s own ability, gifts of nature and grace, but facilitated, stimulated and
helped along by the teacher.
The skills of the teacher: signs, questions,
love
One can summarise
Thomas Aquinas’s understanding of pedagogy, of teaching methods, with the
phrase ‘putting imagination at the service of reason’. Part of the appreciation
of creation that comes from Saint Dominic’s insight is the conviction,
supported philosophically by Aristotle, that all human understanding begins in
sensation and remains always dependent on sensation. The highest philosophical
and even theological understanding depends always on the simplest activities of
which human beings are capable: seeing, hearing, and touching, remembering and
imagining. Any teacher knows the truth of this. To explain something we need to
illustrate it with a story or an image, with a sign or a symbol, something that
speaks to sensation and imagination, so that our intellectual understanding can
make progress.
The greatest teachers,
Thomas says, do their work by giving good signs, illustrating well what it is
they are trying to help the students to understand. It means good stories and
good pictures, good physical presentations especially when it is something
abstract that is being taught. The great teachers work also by asking good
questions, the best possible questions. We think of the learners as the ones
with the questions and it is important that they have time to put their
questions. It is important that every question be respected. One of the
comments of a teacher that I remember from my schooldays was this, that there
is no such thing as a stupid question, only stupid answers. But part of the
teacher’s skill is also to ask good questions, better questions than those the
students themselves come up with. It is a very effective way to stimulate the
minds of those who are learning to present them with perplexing and difficult
questions, paradoxical questions, questions that puzzle.
As well as giving good
signs and asking good questions, a teacher must also love the people he or she
sets out to teach. Vincent McNabb was a well-known Dominican of the English
province who preached regularly in public in London, engaging in conversations
and disputations with anybody and everybody. Speaking to a group of Dominicans he
said ‘if you do not love the people you are preaching to then shut up, go away,
and preach to yourself’. We can say the same about teaching. If you do not love
the people you are teaching then it is better to take your briefcase, go away,
and try some other profession. Another comment by a teacher which I have always
remembered was made to me by a Dominican brother when I began to teach almost
forty years ago. ‘Don’t forget’, he said, ‘that you are not in the first place
teaching theology, you are teaching people’.
The greatest teacher of all
It is a very important
point with many practical implications for successful teaching. When Thomas
Aquinas finally puts the question, ‘so who is the greatest teacher of them
all’, and gives as his answer ‘Jesus of Nazareth’, the reasons for this
evaluation are the criteria just mentioned: signs, questions, and love, these
are the techniques or strategies of the teacher and we find nobody better at
these things in the history of humanity than Jesus. The other candidate would
be Socrates, regarded by the pagan world as the greatest of teachers. Notice
that neither of these wrote books. They wrote directly onto the hearts of their
students, Thomas says, and this is far more effective teaching than writing
onto paper (or we might add onto the screen of a computer). The signs Jesus
gave are his parables and miracles, the ways by which he led his disciples to
understand what he was teaching them. The questions he put were stimulating and
thought-provoking: ‘who do you say that I am?’, ‘what do you want me to do for
you?’, ‘will you also go away?’, ‘do you want to be healed?’. And of course
there is nobody who has loved his students as Jesus loved his disciples.
All of this comes
together in the Cross, Thomas says, and he is not the only one to say that
everything of importance that we need to learn, we learn from the cross of
Jesus, in the scientia crucis. There Jesus
gave the disciples, and the whole world for all time, the most powerful sign,
the most paradoxical question, revealing the greatest possible love for the
Father and for humanity. Thomas quotes Augustine speaking about Jesus as a
teacher who on the Cross is sicut
magister in cathedra, like a professor on his chair. The Cross of Christ
continues to perplex the world, presenting us with the most fundamental
question about life, giving us the most startling sign, drawing us into the
deepest love.
Dominican Educational Institutions
In the 800 years of its
existence there have been hundreds of educational institutions established and
managed by the Dominicans. Still today in all regions of the world there are
universities and colleges, academies and schools, centres for research and
teaching, where Dominican men and women work as administrators, teachers or
chaplains. There are the houses of study of the Order itself concerned
particularly with philosophy and theology, as well as centres for specialised research
at high academic and intellectual levels. There are schools for the deaf, an
area in which Dominican sisters have been pioneers in various parts of the
world, as well as schools for the poor, for children with special needs of
various kinds, and vocational schools that help young men and women to develop
the knowledge and skills they need for satisfying work and for building up the
communities to which they belong.
The principles that
guide all this research, learning and teaching can be summarised as trust and
love. We see these principles emerging in the intuition of Dominic and we see
them in Thomas’s intellectual development of that intuition. There is trust in
God in the first place and in the truth of God’s creation, in its coherence and
intelligibility. In one place Thomas says that truth is strong in itself and
nothing can prevail against it. Such a conviction explains the openness and
courage with which he engaged with all kinds of texts and arguments, not afraid
of any research or conclusions, because the truth is an objective reality and
it is what all people seek to know.
This trust implies
also a trust in the capacity of human reason to come to knowledge of the truth.
It would make no sense to be a teacher unless we had this double trust: in the
truth itself as an objective and intelligible reality, and in the capacity of
human beings to grow in their knowledge and understanding of that truth. We
must be obedient to the truth when we come to see it, whether it is
demonstrated in the various ways in which scientific truth can be demonstrated,
or shared with us by reliable witnesses in the various ways in which we come to
possess all kinds of knowledge.
Along with trust, the
other basic principle is love which lies at the heart of the Gospel and which
is – as our created nature itself reminds us every day – the reality or
experience in which our deepest fulfilment is to be sought. Teaching can happen
where truth is loved and where people are loved. Jesus teaches this by his
example and by his words. We are not to set any limits to the reach of our love
just as we are not to set any limits to our searching for truth. Who is my
neighbour? We all know the answer Jesus gave to that question. He told the
parable of the Good Samaritan, educating us to see that our neighbour is any
human being in any kind of need, our neighbour is any human being who reaches
out to us in friendship, fraternity or collaboration.
A Dominican
understanding of education will therefore be theological in the first place.
But it is a theological conviction about the capacity of human reason to come
to knowledge of the truth. Presenting a theological vision might seem like a
threat to the independence of reason, to the freedom of intellectual endeavour.
But understood properly it is not so. We can describe a Dominican understanding
of education as a form of Christian humanism in which faith and reason, the two
wings that carry us to knowledge and truth, are working together in a harmony
which is difficult to describe completely in words but which we recognise when
we see it in practice. It honours faith and it honours reason. It values
teaching and it values research and demonstration. In the Dominican vision
faith and reason are not opposed sources of knowledge. Rather are they
complementary, reason within faith articulating and understanding more deeply
what is believed, faith within reason extending its reach and strengthening
reason’s confidence in the value of the truth it comes to know.
