Education & Schooling

EDUCATION/ The Teacher as Benefactor: Thoughts on Education as an Event from St Thomas Aquinas

Andrew Davison

venerdì 4 settembre 2009

Fr Andrew Davison delivered the following paper for the Meeting for Friendship among Peoples last August in Rimini. The theme of the Meeting was “Knowledge is always an Event”.

You have chosen an excellent title for your meeting. Knowledge is always an event. Knowledge is always something specific and historical; it is always linked to particular people and places, particular experiences and objects. This afternoon I offer you an example so that you can illustrate this from your own history. It is drawn from the topic for this session: education. I give you the example of our teachers and the debt we owe to them.

I am sure that almost everyone can identify a teacher who made a great difference to him or her. My sister had a difficult time when she moved up to secondary school. She did not much like studying. She felt uncertain and lost in a large school after the small church school in our village. There was, however, one teacher – her form tutor – who brought her through those first, difficult years by showing her great kindness. For my part, I have been immensely fortunate. I can list a great many excellent teachers – brilliant people, kind, generous, good and enthusiastic - first in the sciences and then in theology and philosophy.

The examples we can each provide underline the fact that education is particular - and event of the meeting of particular people. This aspect of education must be important to you in Communion and Liberation. Father Giussani left you a great legacy in the field of education. Above all, he left an example of education springing from the encounter of one person with another. This, as far as I can see, was the supreme characteristic of his life: really to meet people, and then to let that encounter be an occasion for the search after truth. I am put in mind of the motto of John Henry Newman – Cor ad cor loquitur – heart speaks to heart.

This talk of the legacy of education helps us to understand what we mean when we say that 'knowledge [or education] is always an event'. In English, at least, 'event' can mean something isolated, something that comes and then goes. That is not what we mean: knowledge and education are events that endure.

The gift of education we receive from our teachers fills us with gratitude. Again, this is a topic I associate with Fr Giussani. First, because I know that you bear him a deep sense of gratitude. By his life and work he has become your benefactor. Second, because when I attended a School of Community meeting in Oxford, I was introduced to a passage he had written on this subject. Fr Giussani said that today people behave like a man coming home to find a bunch of flowers on his bed. Finding them, all he does is argue over what sort of flowers they are. He ignores the obvious question of where the flowers came from. Fr Giussani is teaching us that the world lacks wonder, and gratitude towards God.

Whenever I am asked to deliver a paper, as I have been this afternoon, my instinct is to turn to the teacher to whom I owe the greatest debt of gratitude. That is St Thomas Aquinas. We find he has many things to say about education as an event. Think, for instance, that his works were almost always composed for a particular situation – to help this or that person or community. His two large Summae are not at all textbooks to be used anonymously. They are guides to help teachers devise tailor-made courses (Summa Theologiae)or to prepare preachers for individual encounters with non-Christians (Summa Contra Gentiles). His most famous treatment of education does not bear a general title, such as ‘on teaching’. Its title points to the particular human being involved: it is called ‘on the teacher’. [De Veritate, q. 11, a. 1]

Thomas discusses questions of debt and gratitude in his treatment of justice. He has some beautiful things to say. We owe debts of gratitude to many people. He lists four categories. First and foremost there is our debt to God. He is the source of everything good. Next comes our father. (We would say our parents). Birth and upbringing come from God, but they come to us through our parents. Then there are people who hold positions of dignity and responsibility, such as civic leaders. From these people we receive ‘general favours’. Finally, there are benefactors. From them we receive what Thomas calls ‘particular and private favours’. [Summa Theologiae, II-II.106.1 resp.] Thomas points to education as a particularly clear example of a good thing that creates a debt.

Your word 'avvenimento' alerts us that the occasions of education are particular. Thomas also singles out the particularity of education. The teacher comes at the end of a list of greater and greater specificity. We might call this a chain of imitation. First, God is the source of all good things and our parents imitate him. Just as God gives being to everything that exists; our parents give being to us alone. Similarly, all knowledge and guidance come from God; from our parents we receive ‘education and learning’ in a specific way.

Then, just as parents share in God’s work, others in turn share in the work of parents. There are various people who aid us at specific points. Again the example comes from education. He talks of ‘professors’ who guide us ‘in matters of learning’. They share in the work of teaching, which is first God’s, and then our parents’, and then the professor’s. [Summa Theologiae, II-II.102.1 resp.] The person who shares in the work of the parent in this way does so in an even more specific and particular way than they do. The parent has to teach us about all sorts of things, all the time. The teacher instructs us in this particular thing at this particular time.

The good things we receive put us in debt to others: to God, to our parents, to people in positions of dignity and to our benefactors. In each case we have a debt to repay. Christians are to sit lightly to most debts, as the Pater Noster tells us. There is one sort of debt, however, in which we rejoice: this debt of gratitude – what St Paul calls the debt of love. [‘Owe no one anything, except to love one another’ (Romans 13:8)] We have such a debt of love and gratitude first towards God, and then our parents. These are debts greater than we ever could repay. Then there are others, ‘from whom [we have] received great benefits’. [Summa Theologiae, II-II.62.5 resp.] To them also we owe a debt. Teachers are clearly in this category.

Why is this important? Well, first, I want to point out that your topic is a good topic, and that Aquinas, the universal teacher of the Church, agrees with your phrase – knowledge is always an event. Second, I want to remind us all of the gifts we have received from our teachers. This should spur us on to be good educators ourselves, in whatever way that falls to us. This is one of the ways we begin to repay the debt. We can be good and attentive teachers ourselves, or support the work of teaching with our time and money.

There are two further reasons why it is useful to remember that our teachers are our benefactors. The first is that it strengthens the bonds that bind us together, within the church and within our societies. In England, our common life is in a very sick state indeed. Everywhere we see selfishness and apathy. The cords that bind people together are fraying.

We live in a world that is too comfortable with debt - financial debt - but is entirely uncomfortable with the debt that matters - the debt of love and gratitude. People are uncomfortable with this debt because it implicates them with one another. The Christian will reply that we are indeed all implicated and involved with one another, and that this is a joyful thing. 'My life and my death', said St Anthony Abbot, 'are with my neighbour'.

What better remedy could there be for this isolation than to remember that ‘education is always an event’ – an event that puts us in debt to our teachers, which spurs us on to acts of generosity towards others? This re-forges those bonds of connection. Wittgenstein reminds us that even to acquire a language is to become enmeshed in a community and to receive a precious gift. Just to be able to speak to you today, I am a debtor to a community larger than I can imagine.

Finally, I want to return to where I began and to Fr Giussani’s story of the flowers left on the bed, with no one grateful for them, no one wondering where they came from. The Christian faith is under attack in English-speaking countries and in other parts of the world. An important part of our miserable state is a profound apathy towards God and religious things. Reviving gratitude, I am sure, is central to the task that faces us. If I could point to one thing that we should work to inspire, it would be gratitude. Our task is to reawaken gratitude: for life and existence, for love and for happiness, for family and friends, for education and knowledge – for a great many things. Fr Giussani wanted to awaken wonder; he wanted people to see the world in all its glory. He thought that this would lead people to God, and he was right.

At the heart of this is gratitude. Most people, deep down, feel it. It comes near the surface at particular times – at a marriage, at the birth of a child, quite often when someone dies and his or her life is remembered. At these times, and at others, we can encourage gratitude in the people around us. We can encourage them to ask the most basic question: to whom are we grateful for the good things of life: for life itself, for beauty, for love? We are grateful to the Great Giver: to God himself.

This is the path we hope to travel, and with us others who have yet to know or honour God. Knowledge and education are a good place to begin – that is my suggestion today. We could first see education as an event, and from that move on to gratitude, and from gratitude – always – to God.