Ep 07 | St. Basil the Great, St. Thomas Aquinas, and G. K. Chesterton: The Sacramental Imagination
If we want to cultivate virtue in our children (and, let’s be honest, in ourselves), we need to learn about the sacramental imagination. Some define it as "seeing the love of God in all things” but I’m partial to seeing “a halo to the edges of all earthly things”. Without this awareness of God’s Reality, how do we know the way further up and further in?
Footnotes for this episode
The Great Tradition, ed. Richard Gamble
“Letters to Young Men”, St. Basil the Great
Heavenly Participation: The Weaving of a Sacramental Tapestry, Hans Boersma
A Philosophy of Education, Charlotte Mason
30 Poems to Memorize Before It’s Too Late, CiRCE Institute
Gratitude in Life’s Trenches, Robin Philips
Imagining the Kingdom, James K. A. Smith
The Reading Life: The Joy of Seeing New Worlds Through Others’ Eyes, C. S. Lewis
For the Life of the World, Alexander Schememann*
The Velveteen Rabbit, Margery Williams
St. Francis of Assisi, G. K. Chesterton
Orthodoxy, G. K. Chesterton
The Everlasting Man, G. K. Chesterton
“The Ethics of Elfland", G. K. Chesterton
Summa Theologiae, St. Thomas Aquinas
Logic of the Body, Matthew LaPine
*I haven’t read For the Life of the World (It’s on my list this year!) but I feel confident recommending it because of how often it’s referenced in footnotes to other things I read and enjoy.
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READ THE TRANSCRIPT
The world is charged with the grandeur of God.
It will flame out, like shining from shook foil;
It gathers to a greatness, like the ooze of oil
Crushed. Why do men then now not reck his rod?
Generations have trod, have trod, have trod;
And all is smeared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil;
And wear man’s smudge and shares man’s smell: the soil
Is bare now, nor can foot feel, being shod.
And for all this, nature is never spent;
There lives the dearest freshness deep down things;
And though the last lights off the black West went
Oh, morning, at the brown brink eastward, springs —
Because the Holy Ghost over the bent
World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings.
“God’s Grandeur,” Gerard Manley Hopkins
_____________
This is the second time I’ve opened an episode with a poem and the second time I’ve opened an episode with a poem by Gerard Manley Hopkins. He’s my favorite.
I opened with “The world is charged with the grandeur of God,” a line heavy with meaning.
Sometimes I hope if I read enough of Hopkins’ poetry, I’ll see the world as he did. The world is charged with the grandeur of God—meaning it’s commanded by God’s charge but also electrified, putting a halo on the edge of all earthly things.
And that’s what I want to talk about today: the halo on the edge of all earthly things.
If you’re just joining us this season, I politely ask you to stop this episode and listen to the season from the beginning. I’m intentionally charting a course through the foundational ideas of classical education, and each episode builds upon the ones before it. I’d hate for you to be lost in a podcast meant to help you get your bearings.
For the rest of you, welcome to the final episode of our virtue mini-series. Last time, we spent a great deal exploring Lewis’ lecture entitled “Men Without Chests” and, through that, we learned that if, as Plato suggested, our heads are to rule our bellies, we’ll need strong chests.
But I didn’t have the time to talk about how one really forms such a person. We touched briefly on our need for story and will continue to do so, but today, I want to bring a bit of a twinkling eye to our conversation that is actually very necessary in forming virtue.
So, here’s the roadmap for this episode. We’re taking a turn through the sacramental imagination, which I believe is how we live into the deeper story of God’s reality. This imagination allows us to see as things truly are. But if you’re thinking you already know what is meant by sacrament or imagination, grab a cup of tea, my dear listener, because it might not be quite what you’re thinking.
After we’ve taken some time with the imagination, I want to bring in our three philosophers for today as guides through what Plato called the tripartite soul: the head, the belly, and the chest. Yes, back to C.S. Lewis and The Abolition of Man.
I hope you’re beginning to see this is one long, great conversation to which you’ve now pulled up a chair.
But, onto our philosophers.
Guiding us through the head will be St. Basil the Great. Guiding us through the belly will be St. Thomas Aquinas. Guiding us through the chest will be G.K. Chesterton. Together, they’ll show us how a well-ordered person moves through the world, which is to say, how a virtuous person pursues that which is true, good, and beautiful.
Mhmm, we’re also going to be pulling the transcendentals in. I know these things can sound like catchphrases when they fall on your ears, but when put into conversation with one another, you see how they form an integrated, harmonious whole education for the whole person.
So first, what is a sacramental imagination?
I understand sacrament can be a word that startles some. You may think of things like baptism or the Eucharist or hundreds of years of church disagreements. While we will be talking about something mysterious, we’re not speaking about those specific mysteries.
Instead, sacramental refers to the reality of divine splendor in the commonplace things of life. Some describe it as seeing the love of God in all things. I particularly like the use of “a halo to the edges of all earthly things”. It acknowledges there’s a greater Reality present around us to which our natural world points and in which it participates. It’s aware there’s an extra dimension to what we already know and experience. What we can see, touch, feel, smell, and taste are really signs and symbols for the heavenly Reality around us—meaning, when we’ve been rightly oriented and ordered, we can learn to see the supernatural light on natural things.
We can learn to see the world charged with the grandeur of God.
If this sounds a little weird, hang with me. Think about a time when God has been near to you. Even though he’s always near to us, we all probably have times when he’s felt especially near in some special way. For a moment, the veil slightly lifts and some sort of special grace allows us to experience God more directly.
I remember clearly Holy Friday in 2010. I was visiting a friend’s family in the Pacific Northwest which is a part of the United States that already clearly declares the glory of God in its natural beauty. Running through the trees with the snow-capped mountains in the distance, I meditated on passages from Isaiah and the gospels about Christ’s death on the cross. I was turning a corner when suddenly, the sky grew grey and the wind picked up. I still really don’t have the words for what happened and that’s kind of the point. The wind began to whip and woosh and whirl, and, for a moment, it felt like God was inexplicably very near to me. I was completely alert but also relaxed. Reverently fearful but at peace. It was as if the Great Lion of Judah was breathing on me directly and the ordinary thing—the wind—was transformed into something of “special glory and grace”.
I couldn’t explain it to my friend that day and I honestly can’t put it fully into words right now, but God was very near and I knew it in the wind.
Had I known then what I know now about the Great Tradition and the historic Christian view of the world, I might have had an easier time understanding what will always be the magnificent Holy Friday of 2010. We moderns think of this type of experience as a personal interpretation or feeling, or me putting a pair of supernatural goggles on a natural phenomenon or trying to make a Christian thing out of an ordinary thing. But the historic Christian view, the classical view, the encounterer view, the all-the-things-I-talk about view, is that God is present in all of his creation but our sight is too weak and our world too muddled with sin for us to see it clearly. In those moments when the veil is thin, we see more clearly what is actually always present. God is always near me, but I’m not usually able to see it to that degree.
And so it’s our sight that needs to be cultivated. Historically, spiritual maturity was characterized by an ability to see in a way that allowed one to perceive spiritual things—to note the halo at the edge of earthly things.
Think about when you became a mother. For many, this is a life change that brings deep spiritual formation in an eye-opening way. All of a sudden, things like how you cook a meal, how you bathe an infant, how you rock and hum in the wee hours of the night are not only tasks to do but moments where God meets us clearly and kindly and where we see that our own actions in the world matter beyond only chopping and baking but in a deeply formational way—either towards God or away from him.
So, the things of the world are actually signposts to the hidden reality of the One who made them. The sacramental view understands that a physical, material thing speaks to us of the Real(er) thing.
I’ve been talking about capital-R reality quite a bit this season. If you remember, our captain idea for this whole thing is Lewis’ remark: “For the wise men of old the cardinal problem had been how to conform the soul to reality,” but allow me, today, to finish the sentence fully, “For the wise men of old the cardinal problem had been how to conform the soul to reality and the solution had been knowledge, self-discipline, and virtue.”
I hope you don’t think I held onto that last part for mischievous means, it’s just that we needed to really get our bearings in the idea of virtue before I could add it in.
Will you allow me to translate this sentence into Charlotte Mason speak? It would delight me to do so.
Thank you.
“For the wise men of old the cardinal problem had been how to conform the soul to reality and the solution had been life, discipline, and atmosphere.”
Life: generous curriculum of living ideas made into knowledge through the acts of observing, attending, and narrating.
Discipline: habits that set the norm of a child’s life towards truth, goodness, and beauty so their soul soil is well-cared for and receptive to the reality of God’s world.
Atmosphere: right relating to God, to others, to things, also known as ordo amoris, or loving the right things at the right time and in the right way which is to be virtuous.
How does one conform a soul to Reality? Through the very instruments of education you’ve known you had all along but put to work in a sacramental world.
It can be difficult for adults to capture the idea that Reality is something beyond our material world—and not in a way where we dismiss or despise the material world, no, no! But in a way where we see the halo at the edge of all earthly things. It requires that we become like children, recapturing the childlike sense of wonder and delight we once had.
Like I said, children naturally do this: they see God’s world as alive with enchanting realities. The sun rises every morning. Imagine that! And the moon every evening too. Imagine tracking, for the first time, the phases of the moon. What marvelous shapes it makes! Like changing outfits, it looks a little different over the course of a few weeks until suddenly it disappears and we wait patiently for it to peek out and greet us again. Do you know the gooey gift of a warm chocolate chip cookie or the satisfaction of hearing your favorite story again and again—unchanging and yet always revealing something more?
These are, of course, the natural order of things, and we are very adult-ish in our ability to dismiss them as natural law and commonplace.
But we learned, last time, about the type of man who can’t see the Atlantic Ocean as anything more than tons of gallons of cold salt water—Lewis called him a trousered ape.
The ape lacks a chest. He lacks wonder. He’s blind to the halo.
The poet John Donne once wrote, “There is nothing that God hath established in the constant course of Nature, and which therefore is done every day, but would seem a miracle, and exercise our admiration, if it were done but once.”
If the sun only rose once, we would still be talking about it. Our great-great-great-grandchildren would be talking about it.
But I want to be clear that this is not a childish way to view things. It’s just child-like, because children are naturally better at it. Their imaginations are more alert, hungry for the things of God, and steadfast in their faith in the good. This is where the imagination comes in.
When I say imagination, I don’t mean disappearing into a realm of the fantastical but rather understanding our experiences in a way that forms us towards God or away from him, towards Truth or away from it. We imagine all of the time–taking ideas and images from our lives and creating metaphors that we continue to use, time and time again, to interpret our present circumstances. We tell ourselves a story and, then, of course, we must ask if we’re telling ourselves a good story? A true story? The Story?
Which is to ask if we are living, and responding, according to Reality. This was our chat last time. Lewis’s idea of just sentiments—the power of the chest—is based on the belief that earthly things demand certain responses in an objective reality. So, as we imagine and understand the things around us, we are feeling either just or unjust sentiments. Just sentiments are right responses to Reality. Unjust are not.
If earthly things indeed are edged by a halo, how then ought we to respond to them?
This is the work of the sacramental imagination, and without it, we’ll fail to reach those just sentiments. Our children will fail to reach those just sentiments and without those, how will we ever form chests? Rule the belly? Be virtuous?
Now, secretly, our three philosophers have been speaking throughout this episode, but before we make their presence explicitly known, I want to make sure you know that there are footnotes to all of my episodes in the episode notes. Particularly today, I want to point out that I have pulled from favorite books from across theological traditions to show this is a historic Christian perspective of the world, and you’ll find those books listed in the Footnotes, if you’d like to do more reading on this sacramental view of the world.
Now to the head.
Which we have to start with so I can introduce you to my favorite of the nine philosophers in our series. I know, you probably thought my favorite was Lewis and I understand your guess. I adore Lewis and consider him the baptizer of my imagination, but, he’s not my favorite overall. No, that would be St. Basil, a 4th century bishop. I came across his philosophical work as I came in through the wardrobe, and it was his “Letters to Young Men”—also known as “To Young Men, On How They Might Derive Profit from Pagan Literature”—that first caught my attention.
Things you need to know about this dear friend of mine: St. Basil himself received a very classical education with an emphasis on Greek epic poetry and plays, histories, rhetoric, and Platonic philosophy. He fought the Arian heresy threatening the early church and his monastic rules are still foundational in the Orthodox and Catholic Churches.
The aforementioned letter is a rather famous one throughout church history. It’s considered a definitive Christian response to pagan culture and an exposition of Christian education. Lovers of the liberal arts are delighted to see evidence that the early church had a liberal arts curriculum of, at least, rhetoric, grammar, philosophy, astronomy, and geometry. Everyone likes finding roots for their loves, you know.
But, it’s true. St. Basil openly mentions or quietly references Plato, Homer, Hesiod, Plutarch, and others. He believed Christianity should charitably converse with the ancients and even cites Moses and Daniel as examples of those who first learned the pagan culture in preparation for God’s work. So, St. Basil thought it possible to care for a soul with pagan literature.
But not without wisdom.
Everything we do, St. Basil wrote, is in preparation for eternal life. Our hope leads us to a more distant time and whatever helps us in that life—as citizens of heaven—should be loved and pursued with all our strength. Whatever hinders this pursuit must be ignored.
Naturally, then, the holy Scriptures lead the way, teaching us through mysteries. But it can be difficult to understand the depth of the meaning of these. It takes time and a lot of wisdom. While in pursuit of that deep wisdom, St. Basil argued we could benefit from analogies that aren’t entirely different from scripture. It reminds me of Mason’s line that I share every other episode that we shall not live by bread alone but by every word that proceedeth out of the mouth of God shall man live—whether it be spoken in the way of some truth of religion, poem, picture, scientific discovery, or literary expression. By way of the things listed there, we offer shadows and reflections that give preliminary training to the eye of the soul so we can learn to imitate the good and understand, more deeply, the mysteries of God.
St. Basil believed it was a duty to associate with the best writers of prose, orators, poets, historians, philosophers, and any man from whom there was a prospect of benefit for the soul.
This was when I caught the spirit of the phrase, “truth, beauty, and goodness”.
Before, it was this nice-sounding phrase that acted like a catch-all for everything idyllic. I couldn’t tell you why it was being used other than, “Who doesn’t like truth, goodness, and beauty?”
But St. Basil made me pause and think about the pursuit of truth, goodness, and beauty; and his Platonic philosophy helped me see how each part of our soul corresponds with a transcendental. It’s not a catchphrase that sounds nice, it’s a boundary and a path to God. The things that are true, good, and beautiful are from him and of him and in him. They are not the end, but they end in God. So we pursue them, we protect them, we pass them on.
When it came to the mind, I began to see how a virtuous love of truth was less about having all the answers and informing others of them and more about recognizing the presence of the Logos in the structure and nature of all things. It’s the sacramental view again: we must learn to understand, as best we can with mystery, how the spiritual has been breathed into the earthly things, like the wind blowing on and in me on Holy Friday.
As Christians, we know Christ is the Logos, the unifying principle who holds all things together, who is the Word made flesh, who is the Light by which we see. When the tradition speaks of the rational or the mind, it’s something much larger than our modern rationalism. There is no secular-sacred divide in the old past, no conversation about the supernatural and the natural. To know about the world was to know something about order, meaning, creation, and telos—even in the pagan philosophies. A true mind cannot know everything through reason alone, but is formed by divine revelation, study of the natural world, the life of the Church, and good story. It’s tuned to the sacramental story and has learned to trace the transcendentals, ordering itself to their pattern.
St. Basil gives us some practical advice as we search out what is true, good, and beautiful because while it all comes from and points to and participates in God, you can find it in all sorts of places. He says to act like the bee. He wrote, “For these neither approach all flowers equally, nor in truth do they attempt to carry off entire those upon which they alight, but taking only so much of them as is suitable for their work, they suffer the rest to go untouched. We ourselves too, if we are wise, having appropriated from this literature what is suitable to us and akin to the truth, will pass over the remainder.”
Seek out the transcendentals as signs and symbols, shadows and reflections of the One who is truth, goodness, and beauty, and let your mind be renewed so you can think on whatsoever is true, honest, just, pure, lovely, and of good report. You know, the things of virtue.
Now, speaking of finding goodness in odd places, I stumbled into St. Thomas Aquinas in an unexpected place: a new book on retrieving a theological psychology. Matthew Lapine’s Logic of the Body is a tremendous read about properly understanding the emotional life of a person. He weaves classical and modern resources together to show how cognitive and physical stories are reconciled through a deeply robust theological understanding. It was here I found St. Thomas’s ideas on the imagination, and so he will be our guide on the sacramental imagination as it pertains to the belly.
For Plato, the belly was the part of the soul that held the appetites or desires, basically, the physical pleasures or the pursuit of pleasure. Now, we know that our head ought to rule the belly through the chest, which means the mind must know what is right and good, and the chest must respond with a right sentiment that provides courage, fortitude, and faithfulness to achieving the direction of the mind—even if the belly wants something else. Our five-year-olds may want ice cream all the time, but their head will learn to tell them that’s not good for them. The mind and the chest bring the belly into submission to what is good—hopefully. That’s the fight for virtue, and we and our children are in that fight.
But, gratefully, we have St. Thomas’ work on the passions, which is one of the most robust and holistic understandings of the passions.
Passions, according to St. Thomas, are acts of passive power that don’t involve rational volunteering or the agreement of the mind. The passion is often habitual and can be called a sense appetite, meaning it is often moved by an external object in pursuit of an apparent good…that may not actually be good. Which is why the sensitive appetite or passion must be ruled by the mind and the chest or, to put it in Mason, the intellect and the will.
Our passions, and the passions of our children, are responses to some kind of imagining whether that be a present object or imagining an absent one. That response is not a cognitive response but a trained response based on past images we’ve stored. Our minds were designed to take in information like, “Snakes are dangerous,” and use it to aim toward goodness (in this case, goodness being keeping ourselves safe). When we come across a snake on the trail, we will feel fear and scream or run or jump before our rational minds begin to give us commands. This is because our belly responds first thanks to the imagination. And this works in good ways too. We pursue and want warm bellies from hot cocoa on a cold day because we’ve stored images of cozy, warmth, sweets, and our minds agree this is good for us.
What does this remind you of?
It reminds me a great deal of the Kingdom of Mansoul from Charlotte Mason. And the idea that we are not brains-on-sticks but lovers-of-things from James K. A. Smith. It makes me think of the vision of the good life and the satisfaction of virtuous living. This is all stuff we’ve already discussed and already know is foundational to how we educate, but here we have St. Thomas tying the imagination to our unconscious, split-second reactions in our passions.
Charlotte Mason frequently wrote that we needed to fill the minds of our children with tales of bravery, heroism, and virtue. We need to create mind museums full of the most beautiful art and let the background hum of their minds be the best of composers. We need to observe the beauty and order of the natural world to foster wonder and enchantment as the posture of their hearts.
When we do these things, we’re forming imaginations. We’re continually saying, “This, not that.” This is worth your time, attention, and love and this is the good life—in the future yes, but presently too. What we love and study and delight in here presently is tied to the heavenly reality that is and is to come. When we feast in a meadow we are showing our children something presently and futurely true about Heaven. And we cement, deep in the belly, a longing for truly good pleasure, for the things of God that are in themselves satisfying, lovely, and delightful.
A “gut reaction”, if you will, towards goodness is a tremendous gift to give your child. For them not to just have minds that tell them what is good but to love what is right at the right time and in the right way—to want it—is to live a life of harmony where the mind and the chest and the belly are aimed in the same direction, in the same Story.
And so we turn to the chest, the place of just sentiments, right relating, allegiance, and G. K. Chesterton. I have to tell you my favorite fun fact about Chesterton. He was married to the general secretary of the P.N.E.U.—yes, Charlotte Mason’s school union. He even wrote for the Parent’s Review! Is that not the happiest connection you heard this week?
But anyway.
Chesterton has brought many a person through the wardrobe with his enchanting, wonder-filled view of the world. He believed the most foundational thing missing in our ability to cultivate a sacramental view of the world was wonder. A great lover of George MacDonald, he shared MacDonald’s belief that, “To cease to wonder is to fall plumb-down from the childlike to the commonplace—the most undivine of all moods intellectual. Our nature can never be at home among things that are not wonderful to us.”
We moderns have overshot, as it were, believing the material is all we have. We Christians are tempted to reverse overshoot and say the material is unimportant. But Chesterton gives us good counsel when he charges us to recover, not refuse the natural things.
Classical education is a great retrieval of things forgotten, overlooked, dismissed. It is an attempt to relearn a posture that feels unfamiliar and uncomfortable. It’s to grow a chest which has all but atrophied into our bellies.
But it can be done. And Chesterton wanted to do it by delighting in what we call “natural law” and story, particularly fairy tales. I won’t dive far into fairy tales specifically as these philosophers are stretching my podcast episodes into “too-long” territory as it is and we’ll also be hearing from Emelie Thomas in the next episode all about story—its importance and form and beauty and goodness.
But I’ve always been stuck by Chesterton’s no-nonsense attitude that if we were truly sane, we’d see the natural world alive with splendor and magnificence like in a fairytale. We would agree with Chesterton in “The Ethics of Elfland” when he says,
“A man varies his movements because of some slight element of failure or fatigue. He gets into an omnibus because he is tired of walking; or he walks because he is tired of sitting still.
But if his life and joy were so gigantic that he never tired of going to Islington, he might go to Islington as regularly as the Thames goes to Sheerness.
The very speed and ecstasy of his life would have the stillness of death. The sun rises every morning. I do not rise every morning; but the variation is due not to my activity, but to my inaction.
Now, to put the matter in a popular phrase, it might be true that the sun rises regularly because he never gets tired of rising. His routine might be due, not to a lifelessness, but to a rush of life.
The thing I mean can be seen, for instance, in children, when they find some game or joke that they specially enjoy. A child kicks his legs rhythmically through excess, not absence, of life.
Because children have abounding vitality, because they are in spirit fierce and free, therefore they want things repeated and unchanged. They always say, ‘Do it again’; and the grown-up person does it again until he is nearly dead. For grown-up people are not strong enough to exult in monotony.
But perhaps God is strong enough to exult in monotony. It is possible that God says every morning, ‘Do it again’ to the sun; and every evening, ‘Do it again’ to the moon.
It may not be automatic necessity that makes all daisies alike; it may be that God makes every daisy separately, but has never got tired of making them.
It may be that He has the eternal appetite of infancy; for we have sinned and grown old, and our Father is younger than we.
The repetition in Nature may not be a mere recurrence; it may be a theatrical encore.”
What if we saw the world like this? What if we saw the earthy things and noted the response they demand of us? What if our kids did?
To have a chest is to take a feeling or a desire and ask, “Is this just? A proper response to that which I’m facing?” and to know, by the power of the imagination and the strength to choose, if you are rightly responding to God’s world. The imagination feeds on things like fairytales because in a fairytale, we also see our own world more clearly. The things that trip us up on Instagram, the news cycle, your schools’s grammar book aren’t in a fairytale. There’s a clear morality, an understanding of who is virtuous and who is not—a child’s (or your) allegiance to the picture of goodness and flourishing is cemented, helping them check their own sentiments in their world. To know Beauty from the Grimms’ Beauty and the Beast is to know how to have courage, to love others more than self, to see beyond appearances. To know Beauty is to ask oneself, “Do I love others well? Things? Do I judge on appearances?” All questions children must ask of themselves and, hopefully, find Beauty as a faithful guide, a pattern, an Ideal type.
So, give your children nature and give them fairy tales and every good story you find. You’re building out their ability to see God’s world as it is: alive, enchanting, meaningful, ordered, otherly. And this sight must come before the chest which must come before virtue—which comes before the good life.
And there you have it. Our virtue mini-series concludes, and it is with Chesterton that I say, “It is with the utmost daring I have discovered what has been discovered before,” because while I know how much I’ve inherited from the many classical philosophers and educators before me, I don’t always get to focus so heavily on their individual works and ideas. It’s the pain of not giving four episodes to one topic, but I hope this has been helpful in understanding virtue in classical education and in finding your bearings beyond the wardrobe door.
While I stole the wardrobe language from Lewis, it’s from St. Basil I stole the image of getting our bearings in a world we’re traveling. So, I let him close us out:
“...if anyone reckons up all the time which has elapsed since men have existed, I shall laugh thereat as at a childish idea when I gaze towards that long and ageless eternity whose limit the mind can in no wise grasp any more than it can conceive an end for the immortal soul. It is for this eternity that I would exhort you to acquire travel-supplies, leaving no stone unturned, as the proverb has it, wherever any benefit towards that end is likely to accrue to you. And because this is difficult and calls for toil, let us not on this account draw back, but recalling the words of him who urged that every man should choose the life which is in itself best, in the expectation that through habit it will prove agreeable, we should attempt the best things.”
The best things, dear listener.
The best.
I’ll see you in two weeks.
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