The great educator and cultural historian Walter Ong, S.J., wrote an essay for America in 1990 in which he suggested the metaphor of yeast can serve as a powerful model for Catholic education.
Yeast, he wrote, is an agent of infusion, of integration and penetration that transforms the flour into which it is introduced. He compared this with the integrating quality of faith.
Father Ong had good authority for the metaphor. Jesus spoke of the kingdom of God as being like leaven.
I would like to contrast this metaphor of yeast with a metaphor of “frosting,” as applied to Catholic education.
Rather than infusing a cake the way yeast does, frosting does not permeate the cake, but only layers itself upon it.
These two metaphors capture in a simple, but I believe accurate way, two competing visions of Catholic education, from preschool to university.
Yeast
Father Ong explained that the function of yeast has parallels in the etymology of the word “catholic,” which comes from the Greek katholikos, from kath or kata (“throughout”) and holos (“whole”): “throughout-the-whole.”
Like yeast in a loaf, faith, in a genuinely Catholic education, interacts with all other disciplines, such as the humanities, sciences, social sciences and the professions.
Faith does not replace disciplines or transform them into itself; rather, when faith encounters reason, it reveals and orders reason’s deeper realities of truth and goodness.
Like yeast, faith expands throughout the whole educational enterprise because there are no limits to its borders.
Faith, not a mere emotion but a divine illumination, is the theological virtue that expands the mind and soul, enabling us to see more deeply and more broadly.
When faith views a human being, it sees everything the natural eye sees, but it pierces more deeply into the depths of human reality.
It does not fall prey to the reductive sight that sees only a biological organism whose value can be measured in strictly economic terms.
Instead, the eyes of faith perceive a unique and unrepeatable immortal soul, made in the image of God and intended for the kingdom.
Faith sees the invisible in the visible, the spirit in matter, the immeasurable in the measurable. Faith is a habit of mind whereby eternal life begins in us, where we see the end in our beginnings.
Closer to home, it is with vision leavened by faith that I can see the image of God in that student in the back row with the baseball cap, whose bored look signals that I cannot teach him a thing.
Faith and other disciplines
Examples of bringing faith into contact with other disciplines abound in the Catholic educational tradition.
A few examples among many include the early church fathers, who built upon the Greco-Roman philosophical tradition, bringing out the intrinsic complementarity of faith and reason.
Another classic example is that of the scholar/saints like Albert the Great and Thomas Aquinas, who performed a similar yeast-like operation when a flood of ancient writings (often filtered through Muslim thinkers), especially of Plato and Aristotle, swept through European societies and were integrated into the work of universities.
More recently, Catholic social teaching has engaged with business theory and practice, exploring the relationship between the social nature of property and capital, applying a Christian view of justice and its implications for wages and prices and wealth distribution, as well as contributing to an understanding of the nobility of the vocation and the work of business leaders.
Another recent example might be found in the current dialogue among scientists, theologians and philosophers on some of the most momentous scientific questions facing us, such as the theory of the Big Bang, the origin of the universe and evolutionary thought.
These conversations and insights of integration enrich both the various disciplines and faith itself.
The disciplines become more nourishing and less reductionist, and faith is purified by seeing more concretely what the legal scholar Helen Alvaré calls the “inbreaking of the Kingdom.”
Tension and debate will no doubt arise in the interaction of faith and reason, but this is nothing new in the Catholic educational tradition.
The medieval university’s pedagogical approach was structured on such questions and debates. Its pedagogy was dialectical, including both lecture and disputation.
The lecture was not given to evoke mere assent, but as a prologue to disputation.
The Socratic method—the art of the question—was incorporated into Thomas Aquinas’s Summa Theologiae, proposing questions and articulating both sides of an argument in search of a deeper synthesis.
Yet students are increasingly afraid to disagree with others, often out of fear of being labeled or of simply being wrong. This is a debilitating condition for education.
A Catholic education should hone the art of the question that is “questing” not for slogans or political correctness (whether left or right), but what the Rev. Luigi Giussani called the “religious sense,” an ultimate meaning that is discoverable but never exhaustible.
The metaphor of yeast and the meaning of the word catholic point us to two key integrating principles of Catholic education: the unity of knowledge and the complementarity of faith and reason.
The ability to integrate knowledge is the highest activity of the human mind, and it is these two leavening principles that move the mind to wisdom.
If Catholic schools cease engaging such principles, they will no longer operate as yeast. Instead, they are likely to merit the second metaphor mentioned above: Catholic education as frosting. Read more
- Michael J. Naughton is the director of the Center for Catholic Studies at the University of St. Thomas, in Minnesota.
News category: Analysis and Comment.