The Iconic School

The Case for Christian Schools part 11

Towards an Iconic Curriculum

“While we cannot understand in the way God does, our understanding should lead us out of ourselves to experience the other in itself. This is, after all, what the education means. The Latin e-ducare means to lead out, out from ourselves, out from narrow, limited and purely utilitarian knowledge to transcendent knowledge.” – Jack Peterson, Managing for Mission, p.69.

The common derivation of the word ‘education’ from the Latin educo, ‘I lead/draw out,’ may in fact be etymologically unsound, but it is theologically apposite — and it is quite the opposite of Rousseau’s blank slate explored in my last post (under “Freedom Fries.”

Fundamental to Christian anthropology is the notion that all people bear the imprint of God’s image (Genesis 1:27). This image has the potential, by the grace of God, to reflect God’s likeness. The quality of this divine likeness is revealed in the person of Jesus Christ, in whom alone is the divinity of the Father perfectly reflected. The saints are those whose image reflects God next most closely thanks to their imitation of Christ, and such sanctity is the aim of the Christian life. Christian education can therefore be described as bringing out the divine likeness that is within, thereby realizing the person’s God-given inner potential to be the best and fullest version of themselves possible. The Christian school, in short, should aim to make saints.

The idea that people already have within themselves the liberating potential of the image of God sets Christian education at odds with any theory of education as mere input or inculcation. It should arouse a certain suspicion of an educational polity consisting in the mechanistic transmission of uniform sets of data to “blank slate” children, regardless of their interest or capacity, for regurgitation in public examinations. A truly Christian education must rigorously insist on the greatest possible intellectual flourishing and development of critical powers in every pupil, but has to recognise that this is not always commensurate with examination performance. One can do perfectly well in examinations without having learnt anything of value. While a Christian school must prepare pupils for public examinations, it should be wary of allowing education to be reduced to the playing of this game, but must rather ensure that its curriculum is engaged in the higher task of realizing the fullness of the individual God has created each pupil to be.

The movement away from an explicit knowledge-based education, grounded in a belief in truth, towards skills training, in which truth is seen as relative and knowledge as suspect, is not a move towards pristine neutrality but towards a new absolute truth of relativism. We have unmasked the crypto-curriculum behind this. So what should we put in its place? What might a curriculum oriented not towards relativism but towards transcendent truth, goodness and beauty - an iconic curriculum - look like?

As so often, the question breeds another question, because we cannot answer the question of curriculum without first answering the question of canon. We talk about a literary canon, a musical canon, and particularly, the canon of Scripture. But canon, in Greek, literally means ‘measure.’ So when we talk about canon, we are talking about what measures up: what deserves to be in, and what does not. To decide on what belongs in our curriculum, we have to know what we are measuring that decision against. So the question is, what canonical measure are we applying to make our curriculum decisions?

The canon of the Scriptures makes a valuable test case. We speak of the Bible as though it were a single book, composed in one go. Nowadays, we can readily buy a bible from a cut-price bookshop and know pretty much what we are getting: most bibles have identical contents, albeit in different translations, with the exception of Catholic and Anglian bibles’ inclusion of the Deuterocanon (“Apocrypha”). Yet the notion of the Bible as an ownable commodity was inconceivable before Gutenberg. It was only the mass printing of bibles which hardened the canon, including the order of the books printed, into the mainline Protestant versions which now enjoy the widest currency.

In Jesus’ own time, there was no Bible. In fact, the Greek word biblia from which the English word derives is a plural, meaning “books,” and this tells us something about the Bible's real nature: it is not so much a book as a little library of several books, composed over hundreds of years, in a variety of genres and with different audiences and purposes in mind. Much of it was written for use in public worship on sacred scrolls, and certainly was not carried around for private consumption in pocket books. If you want to know more, there is a section in my book, The Catholic Jesus, dedicated to how the canon of the Bible was eventually formed, but suffice it to say for now that the contents of what we now call the Bible only began to be settled by the mid fourth-century, were substantially called into question by Luther and the Reformers, and to this day, there are several variants containing more or less books in various different churches.

The reason I go into this is to point out that the Bible is not its own canon. It does not define its own content. That was the work of the Church, guided by the Holy Spirit. And while each church may disagree on precisely what measures up to the canon of Scripture, the measure itself remains the same: the person of Christ.

The pagan Platonists saw the ultimate height of reality, which they called God or the One, as the Good, the True and Beautiful. Christian Platonists agreed, but qualified this by arguing that Christ is the culmination and personification of the Good, the True and the Beautiful. Christian teachers can apply this wisdom by understanding the person of Christ as the exclusive canon of their curriculum which nonetheless is radically inclusive of all seeking after goodness, truth and beauty. Where the crypto-canon of Rousseau offers only atomisation, self-absorption and division, taking Christ as our canon offers a communion of difference united in self-offering love.

The truth of God revealed in Christ needs to be our basic assumption of truth. This may sound obvious to some Christian educators, but others, particularly head teachers whose Church school is also the community school, may be wary of being seen to limit religious choice. Yet, as school chaplain Fr John Thorpe points out in his article Nine Tips for Teaching Children about Religion, the notion of religion as a ‘choice’ is a very recent one. There are several aspects to our cultural makeup which are entirely unchosen: our nation, our parentage, our language, our race and (it was until very recently uncontroversial to assert) our sex are beyond our choice. They make up part of the collective “tradition” into which we are born. A Christian school can stay faithful to it tradition while still leaving room for informed dissent. Secularism, as I hope I shown, does not have a monopoly on freedom of thought, and in many respects stifles it.

I am not prescribing “Bible-bashing” authoritarianism, but no Christian school should be shy or ashamed of asserting the person of Christ as its basic, guiding truth: for it is precisely this assertion which opens and yields us to others in self-giving love to them. As such, it is the direct opposite of the truly authoritarian imposition of a relativist viewpoint, which brooks no real dissent whatsoever, instead reducing all “differences of opinion” to commodified lifestyle choices operating under its hidden yoke. So, the first supposition of a truly liberating curriculum which will lead students towards truth, goodness and beauty, rather than the manacles of consumer relativism, needs to be Christ. The aim of the curriculum is not to produce new vassals to the consumer machine. Rather, it is to lead pupils to the grace of God, that He may “lead out” of them the Christ whose image is imprinted within.

When a Church school looks at any aspect of its curriculum, in any subject area, it needs to ask three interrelated sets of questions, measuring the answers against the canon of Christ: the questions of Truth, Goodness and Beauty.

The Canon of Truth

The mouth that lies slays the soul —Wisdom 1:11

The first time I taught Year 11 (15-16 year old) pupils about creation, I was astounded by their ideas about the Big Bang theory. Many were already convinced that the Big Bang nullified all religious texts concerning the origins of creation. Their basic presupposition was that science and religion are irreducibly opposed. But their actual definitions of the Big Bang were also wanting: most thought that the Big Bang was some kind of collision between asteroids! If they had ever been taught about the singularity in physics lessons, they had forgotten it. And certainly, they had never heard of Fr Georges Lemaître, the Catholic priest who first posited the theory, or that his fellow scientists coined the term "Big Bang" in mockery precisely because they thought the theory sounded too much like that of religion, as I detailed last time. They had been spun the convenient and lazy myth of a polarity between religion and science, and it was enough for them just to say, “the Big Bang means we don’t have to bother thinking about religion.”

A similar case could be made for the nuances of Darwinian evolutionary theory, another supposed secularist trump card. Yet Darwin’s theory was supported in his day by a majority of scientists who were themselves Christian. Pupils assume that biblical fundamentalism has always been the default Christian position, and that Darwinism challenged this, when in reality, the reverse is true: fundamentalism arose to counter Darwinism’s subsequent segue into basically fascistic social engineering programmes of racialism and eugenics. It is easy to stick to simple, culturally convenient untruths, but the results for a Christian school are disastrous. Before we can even begin to think about the spiritual nourishment and growth of the children, we end up having to fight a rearguard action against falsehoods spun in the popular media, at home, and even in the classroom.

It is important that students can speak openly without fear of being judged, and can explore ideas and experiences, but it is disingenuous for a school modelled on the person of Christ to promote actions which harm the self or others as morally neutral. The criterion of truth should also militate against the hidden rival truth-claim of relativism wherever they lurk in the curriculum. In particular, modern PSHE curricula aim to be value-neutral and non-judgmental in matters including drug-taking and sexual practices. Even Catholic school PSHE programmes frequently ignore the teaching of the Church. Such viable Christian alternatives as A Fertile Heart bear serious consideration. Mature and experienced teachers of PSHE are needed whom the pupils can trust not to moralise at them, but who are aware of cultural presuppositions which they know are damaging to young people and are willing to challenge and question entrenched views.

A Christian school’s curriculum review needs to flag these issues in advance, under the criterion of what is true, and to establish the direction in which the school wishes to guide – not to dupe or coerce – its pupils. If the primary criterion for everything we teach is not truth, we cannot expect pupils to trust whatever else we might wish to say.

The Canon of Goodness

“I should utterly have fainted : but that I believe verily to see the goodness of the Lord in the land of the living” (Psalm 27:15)

To some extent, if the question of truth has been answered in the affirmative, then goodness naturally follows, since whatever conforms to the highest truth is necessarily good. It can never be good in itself to teach falsehood. Sometimes (for instance, in maths and science), simplified half-truths must be taught, but only to provide the basis for the higher learning later on. Even so, this is orienting such half-truth towards the fullness of truth, which is essentially good.

But there is another sense in which the Iconic School must be a school of goodness. If the aim is to engender an iconic view of reality with Christ as that reality’s highest instantiation, then this is a question not only of knowledge, but of its proper and consistent application in everyday life. The Iconic School’s commitment to truth segues into development of pupil character.

He who finds his life (psychē) will lose it, and he who loses his life for my sake will find it. - Matthew 10:39

This paradoxical verse is a powerful summation of Christian teaching on self-realisation. The word ‘life’ here translates the Greek psyche, which means the ‘breath of life,’ or the soul, and is of course the root of our modern word, ‘psychology.’ To find your soul, you have to put your soul to the Cross.

In Jesus’ day, the highest philosophical ideal was to “know yourself,” gnōthi seauton, as famously inscribed on the Temple to Apollo at Delphi. Later Christian writers adopted and adapted this tenet to their faith. For St Augustine, true knowledge of the self led to knowledge of the divine image in which the self is made, and so to God himself, “deeper than my innermost depth,” Deus interior intimo meo, yet at the same time superior summo meo, “higher than my highest height.” Ralph Waldo Emerson captures the paradox in his poem named after that same philosophical maxim, Gnōthi Seauton:

Give up to thy soul-----
Let it have its way-----
It is, I tell thee, God himself,
The selfsame One that rules the Whole...

At a conference for school chaplains some years ago, a Jesuit priest told me that in modern psychology, the most important question that adolescents need to answer for the sake of their later wellbeing is “what kind of person do I want to be?” In other words, the question of self-definition, which can only really be answered with some degree of self-searching and self-knowledge. Failure to come up with any answer to this question leaves people psychologically rootless, unstable and unmoored. Think about the political instability of Great Britain or the United States at the moment. To what extent has the polarisation, the wild pendulum of public opinion and the anger we are seeing materialise into extremism and violent protest, to do with our collective failure of our nation to know itself, and to answer the question of what sort of nation we really want to be?

The Christian paradox of finding the self in yielding the self – which in fact overlaps with the sensibility of other ancient religions and philosophies – offers a corrective to modernity’s overwhelmingly materialistic mindset: a manifesto for a nation with a spiritual and not just an economic purpose.

“The Church has had 1800 years to improve the world and has done nothing. Now we must do it ourselves.”

Karl Marx’s opinion has become so widespread in Europe as to become almost a defining doctrine of modern polity: the only ‘heaven’ will be the one we humans can make on earth. This worldview, widely propagated in schools, universities and the media, is generally expressed in evolutionary terms to lend a veneer of scientific respectability: once upon a time, we were governed by an oppressive Church which kept people in their place and dictated the minutiae of their personal lives. Then, happily, the modern democratic state took control, and since then humanity has been evolving naturally towards an egalitarian utopia of our own making, where all will be given the highest possible freedom of choice to decide exactly who and what we want to be.

And yet this supposed evolution of secularism has not in fact come about naturally. It has been forced and contrived. In revolutionary France and Russia, it was far from gradual, but achieved by extreme violence and coercion. Even in Northern Europe, the eradication of Christianity from the fabric of the State and the popular conscience has been quite deliberate – and far more effective. Social reformers in the twentieth century purposely mined Christian tradition for ethical content when it was useful and reframed it in humanistic terms.

If you have ever been to Walsingham in Norfolk, you will have the walls of the stately homes built from the rubble of monastery dissolved at the Reformation. Likewise you can see to this day purloined fragments of Christian ethical teaching in the modern creed of human rights, and even in the newfangled system of “British values” taught in our schools. These bear only a tangential relation to the meaning of the three crosses overlaid on my country’s national flag.

The early Labour Movement depended on the transference of religious enthusiasms to the secular sphere. Behind the secularist strand of early Socialism was a will to destroy the Church. Marx, who called for the ‘abolition of religion as the illusory happiness of man,’ was a hero to Ramsay McDonald. His government dismissed evidence given by Archbishop Cosmo Gordon Lang and Free Church leaders of the thousands of Christians sent to prison camps or summarily executed on Lenin and Stalin’s personal orders, much as Europe ignores the systematic extermination of Christians in the Middle East and North Africa or Muslims in China today.

George Bernard Shaw, whose name adorned the council block I used to live next to in Camden Town, once declared that a the state should remove children from parents who taught them the catechism of the Church – a policy now effected in a milder form by the refusal of social workers to allow families to adopt children unless they profess the state orthodoxy on sexuality, and by the closure of Catholic adoption agencies. The Proletarian Sunday School movement developed its own baby-naming ceremony and ten commandments, starting with the maxim “Thou shalt not be a patriot.” Echoing the French and Russian revolutions, all the purely “cultural” baggage of Christendom was to be excised from the infant mind.

None of these developments against the Church, the family and the nation, was natural or organic. Their “evolution” has been planned. This is not to deny that good has come of these changes of attitude, notably in abandoning the persecution of sexual minorities. But other developments are more questionable. In a recent survey of British attitudes, 70% say that an abortion should be allowed simply because a woman decides she does not want a child or a couple cannot afford one. 77% say that a person with an incurable disease should be able to ask a doctor to end their life. 41% believe that there is no such thing as a film too violent or too pornographic to be watched by adults. The Christian teaching of the sanctity of every human life, illumined by St Augustine’s “God within,” has been garbled via Rousseau into the right to exercise the greatest possible individual choice, regardless of what effect that choice may have on other people.

Quite contrary to the modern priority of self-interest, the divine nature consists in what theologians call kenōsis, or self-emptying: the emptying of God’s self in the gift of creation, of his divine power in becoming human, of his humanity in dying on the Cross. The Christian understanding of God is as utter self-gift freely given. This kind of altruism is anathema to the Marxist, for whom moral actions are not for the sake of others per se, but are entirely dictated by the interest of one class. Even more moderate Socialism risks falling into seeing people as problems to solve, and the State as the means of solving them. But this leaves many taxpayers asking questions like, “why should I help the homeless, the poor, the sick, when I am paying for the State to do it for me?” And of course, those taxes are not voluntary contributions, they are levied on threat of imprisonment. Nor do the solutions always work, as anyone who has been passed through the sausage machines of state bureaucracy knows. People are removed from the area that their families have lived in for generations at the stroke of a pen. Hospitals and schools get better, the richer the area you live in.

But if State socialism is stony ground for the seed of the Kingdom, consumerism does not offer any better soil: reducing life to a set of supermarket choices and calling this “freedom!” Adolescents had a tough enough job of working out what kind of person they wanted to be when the choices were limited. When everything except the fact of birth becomes a matter of choice, choice itself becomes a tyranny, a mere illusion of freedom. No one political system is sufficient for true human flourishing and freedom. Capitalism and socialism are merely rival systems to ensure the greatest wealth for the greatest number. Any questions of higher purpose end up relegated to the realm of personal, private choice. And so no party dares ask that fundamental question: what kind of nation do we want to be? 

A Christian society would be one shaped by the Cross, one which finds itself in yielding itself for the sake of others. There are, thank God, still instances of this pattern repeating in our society. Back in my London ministry, I saw it around Grenfell Tower, in the hundreds of council workers and emergency service personnel working unpaid hours for the sake of the people evicted from tower blocks nearby. We also worked there with an excellent organisation called Camerados to set up a “Living Room” outside our church in Camden Town. The idea of this was to get away from reducing people to dependency on services and to help them find themselves precisely by giving themselves to each other, helping each other. Diminishing our moral responsibility for one another by systematising it can end up dehumanising the weakest of people - especially the unborn, the disabled, the homeless and the dying.

In the end, the Christian manifesto for life cannot be contained in writing, because the Word has been made flesh, written in a person, Jesus Christ: God incarnate, crucified. It is through not just emulating but sacramentally joining with his self-emptying sacrifice that we find our true self and with it the freedom of God. This cannot be reduced down to sets of “values” or systematised into a state bureaucracy. The shape of the Cross must be impressed into the very character of the self, and so of the nation.

This means that Church schools need to be wary of the slide into “Christian values.” It is absolutely fruitless to mine what is meant to be an evolving relationship with Christ for static and enduring precepts, reducing the Christian faith to an atrophied moralism, embodied in a shopping list of personal commandments which can be bought or left on the shelf one by one at whim. The values approach is embodied by the classic Key Stage 2 “create your own ten commandments” lesson in Religious Studies, which seems to me a wasted learning opportunity and, really, a waste of time. These lists of values only ever end up reflecting the transitory spirit of the age. They have little to do with Christ, and merely listing them imparts none of his character. Failures in church leadership both in the Church of England and the Roman Catholic Church show how readily even the clergy can espouse Christian values while simultaneously exhibiting appalling internal corruption of character, with devastating consequences for those in their care. This is because the pursuit of character is not at heart about the enumeration of values. Values are the passing shadows of virtues. Values amount to a list of actions which one may or may not take. Virtues are internally embedded and developed in the person by a cycle of action and review.

The Ethical Leadership Programme at Lichfield Cathedral School is one example of how virtue ethics can inform and enrich a school curriculum. The pupils strive to develop a set of virtues and to put them in practice through active community engagement, living out the values of the School. From primary age through to Sixth Form, they review their activity in tutorial periods and reflect collectively on their next actions, so aspiring towards the several virtues which the School seeks to inculcate. For any school, however, the question of precisely what virtues the school wishes to promote remains open. There is a danger that these can default to the generic British values provided by the state, perhaps amplified by a few additions chosen by committee. This tends towards Rousseau’s view of the human soul as essentially a carte blanche onto which the more powerful agents of society impose their own mores by sheer exercise of will. An “Iconic School,” which sees goodness woven into reality, cannot subscribe to this view. Rather, it must understand character not so much something impressed by external human agency, but as the dormant nature of every human soul waiting to be awoken and guided to its true nature. This is the image of God in which all people share and which finds its perfect impression in Christ. So, the Christian approach to virtue-based character education must start by asking: what are the virtues of Christ?

In 1 Corinthians 13, St Paul answers this question with basic three ‘theological’ virtues: faith, hope and love. Any Christian approach to character education which misses these virtues will ultimately be deficient.

1. For a school serving a predominantly secular or mixed-faith community, love might seem at first the least controversial of these, and this makes it a good virtue to begin with. After all, what parent could object to their child being brought up to be loving? But for the Christian school, there is a very particular content to this love, and it is the self-giving love of Christ. In curriculum decisions, how can subjects which involve team work build other-centredness and self-gift? How, in a world of self-promotion, might they engender a sense of humility? Can any parts of the curriculum actively encourage community service, rather than mere fundraising? Where is there scope for review and self-reflection on pupils’ relationships with others?

2. Hope is likely to be met with cynicism. Much of the news we read or hear is generated specifically to address our fears, because this is what sells. How can we help pupils read between the lines and uncover the hidden agendas of newsmongers, YouTubers and social media influencers? How, in each subject, can we encourage pupils to share their successes and celebrate good news? Might geography or technology lessons provide opportunities for innovation and service to help reverse social and environmental devastation? No doubt these already happen sporadically and at the behest of individual teachers, but an Iconic School will seek to embed the assumption of hope into the curriculum.

For a Church school, this will mean challenging utopian myths of progress, and will weave into its curriculum the discourse of a hope which persists beyond the potential of human success or failure. And what liberating news this is! If the children at your school are, like most teenagers, weighed down by anxiety about their body image, their personal appearance, their social media status and - importantly - their GCSE and A-level performance, is it not time to share the powerful message that true self-worth does not ultimately depend on any of these things? While we all want to help pupils attain the highest possible standards, we must also avoid complicity with the crushing utilitarianism of our day, because our ultimate hope lies not in our own efforts or abilities, but in the goodness of Christ which is freely available to all, regardless of their status in the eyes of the world. Academic standards should be maintained and promoted, but in hope and with love, not by fear of failure, lest they too become an idol.

3. I have left faith until last, because it is likely to be the most contentious. In a school where, most likely in Britain at present, the majority of children and their parents (and quite possibly the staff) are indifferent to the Christian faith, it would be counterproductive to frame faith in a way which excludes them. The Jesuit Pupil Profile, an excellent resource from which all Christian schools could benefit, deals with this well. We can start with the most inclusive understanding of our iconic view: that all humans find themselves in their orientation towards one another. It is simply true that we depend, socially, on having faith in one another, foremost in our family and friends. Faith here means faithfulness, fidelity and trust. We can also say with integrity that we need faith in ourselves: not in the atomising sense of Rousseau, but in ourselves properly understood as oriented towards one another in love, and so towards the common good. Then, finally, we can crown these general virtues of faithfulness with the insight that the highest model of faith is that of Christ.

To assuage the fears of secularised parents about brainwashing, Christian schools need to make faith an invitation rather than just an assertion. As the Jesuit Institute puts it, “when children drift into lack of faith and hope, when they begin to create prison bars for themselves,” as educators in a Christian school, our role is “to step in with encouragement, opening new doors to a better way forward in freedom.”

This pursuit of goodness through the virtues of faith, hope and love is what I call an “iconic” vision of education. It predates the prevalent secular model and offers considerable added value to the achievement of grades for their own sake or for the fulfilment of a given pupil’s self-determined ambitions. Rather, it expands education to the wider development of wisdom, character, virtue, self-esteem and a spirit of service which appeal to many parents, Christian or otherwise. For a school to become iconic, it needs to show that Christian faith is about opening the mind rather than closing it, while gently pointing out that in fact, it is secular pedagogy which is trying to reconfigure the human mind towards radical infidelity and scepticism. The iconic school is not imposing ideas on a blank slate, but drawing out the inherent orientation towards goodness, truth and beauty which is imprinted in every child’s soul. Our curriculum needs to reflect this with an orientation towards virtue. 

The Canon of Beauty

Light is an image employed in so many religious traditions to denote purity, clarity, unity. And yet, we know that light for all its purity and unity can be divided: white light into the three primary colours, and the infinite spectrum thereafter. In fact, it is the very differentiation of light that allow us to see anything at all, the different wavelengths striking our eyes ready for the brain to translate into images.

“The Lord is my light,” sang the Psalmist of the ancient Jewish Temple. And so Christians believe, with Jews and many others besides, that there is indeed just one primal light for the illumination of the world, one spiritual light that gives all things meaning, source of all insight, wisdom and vision. That one light, we call God.

Many centuries after the Psalmist came a man with challenging words. “I am the light of the world,” he said. “Whoever follows me will not walk in darkness, but have the light of life.” And so it is that those who came to call themselves Christian saw in Jesus a differentiation in that one true light, as the light walked among them in the darkness of their violent and corrupt world: the Father’s Son.

The challenge of Christ’s words did not end with his death. Before he went to the Cross, he had another surprising thing to say to his friends about the Divine Light. “The Lord is my light,” they already knew; “I am the light,” they came to believe; but had he not also said, “you are the light of the world”?

The Christian story continues after Jesus has left this world and ascended into heaven. His chosen Apostles meet and are enkindled with the Holy Spirit, as though by ghostly flames rising from their heads, on the day we know as Pentecost or Whitsun. A third refraction of the one holy light: the Holy Spirit descends and gives new birth to the Church.

One God in three persons is the classic Christian definition of the Trinity. One light, pure and invisible even to the eye of the soul, refracted into our perception. But the refraction does not end with Pentecost. Through the ages, millions of people like tiny facets on some vast prism have refracted some glint of that divine light, each in their own particular way. The great saints of the Christian religion and others, too, are the obvious examples; but the Christian faith teaches that absolutely every person is made in the image of God. Every person has the potential to reflect something of the divine light.

The Church and her schools must always teach truth and strive towards goodness, through the development of character in active social engagement and through reflection on virtue. But if that was all we did, we might as well raze our churches and chapels and build community centres instead. It is the beauty of divine worship and the buildings in which it takes place which makes manifest the the primary role of the Church: namely, the worship of God, for it is through worship that the divine light is kindled in human hearts so that they can become more closely conformed to the Christ-like image they bear.

The recognition of beauty is by no means restricted to Christians. It is a way for God to speak to all people and so, all our pupils. While some pupils may be drawn towards the Good by the academic study of truth, and others through the active practice of goodness in the active pursuit of virtue, there will be still others who find something of the transcendent divinity through the appreciation and creation of beauty. This might be through art and design, music, creative writing, literature, outdoor activities or something else entirely.

In iconic theology, the perception of beauty imparts beauty on the perceiver, and beauty is inseparable from goodness. There are those who would deny this, including John Carey, in his book What Good are the Arts? The book is entertaining but only likely to convince if you already agree with his opening gambit: namely, that beauty is solely in the eye of the beholder, and has no transcendent value. Within pages, he dismisses the Platonic idea of beauty which has informed millenia of speculation and debate among pagans, Christians, Muslims and Jews among others to a sort of naive voluntarism: beauty as the arbitrary taste of an unprovable divine being. The idea that beauty might be woven into the fabric of Being itself as an expression not of the divine will but of the divine nature goes unconsidered. What follows from this rejection is a fairly predictable "Mozart versus Banksy" sort of diatribe.

However, Carey’s criticisms of those who value art more than humanity, and whose aesthetic predilections seem to have left little mark on their character, are important. Many great tyrants and dictators have been avid admirers of art and beauty. Some have even been good amateur artists themselves. While Nero’s amateur dramatics were debatable, Henry VIII was a fair composer and Hitler enjoyed painting watercolours. Worse, violence itself has been aestheticised, since long before the advent of cinema.  Thomas de Quincey’s 1827 essay, On Murder Considered as one of the Fine Arts, was an early herald to the terrors of the following century. In the lead up to the First World War, artists and writers extolled the unprecedented potential for violence that modern mechanisation could employ. The artistic and musical world clamoured for revolution and wanted it won by arms.

In 1914, the composers Ravel and Schoenberg were among the chief rattlers of the sabres so recently forged, quite literally, from ploughshares. Seduced by the new technological possibilities for devastation, Ravel was desperate to join up as an aerial bombardier: he actively wanted to be the one dropping the bombs on people. A radical musical innovator, Schoenberg despised the music of Ravel as bourgeois, and saw the German attack on France as an analogue to his own musical battle against convention: as he wrote in a letter to a Alma Mahler, he hoped that the war might force conservative composers “to venerate the German spirit and worship the German God.” Both composers, men whose lives were dedicated to the pursuit of beauty, were seduced by the new technologies which would let humanity manufacture murder like never before, sanitise it, systematise it and even sanctify it.

Yet their attitude and their works, like many of their peers, changed dramatically when they experienced war for themselves: Schoenberg’s more than Ravel’s, as only the former actually ended up fighting. From 1916, Schoenberg released no new work for seven years. Moving away from the anarchic atonalism of his earlier work, he moved back towards the safer ground of tonalism, developing an influential twelve-tone method. The eye of this particular beholder had clearly been badly seared. Having previously sat lightly to his Jewish origins, from 1922 he returned to overtly Jewish themes of composition. With the dawn of the Third Reich fled to Paris, where in a synagogue in 1933 he publicly reaffirmed his Jewish ancestry and faith. For Schoenberg, it seems, beauty had an ultimate grounding in faith, order and reason after all.

To Carey, the existence of evil amid beauty means that beauty itself has no objective value. Who can deny that truly evil people can still have some love for beauty, and that some people claim to find beauty in evil itself? Even so, we have to set against this the witness of those who have lived through great evil and and discovered a deeper beauty in that which brought them the hope in goodness that they needed to survive, and the faith in a truth which helped them to come to terms with the evil’s aftershocks.

Historically, belief in the fundamental goodness, truth and beauty of reality has not meant assigning these qualities to an arbitrary divine will, the “good taste” of God. I have already argued the dangers of reducing beauty to a matter of will and consensus. It should be clear by now that when I say that it can never be good or beautiful, for example, to try to exterminate an entire race, I am not saying that because I think that this is a matter of God’s taste, as though God might “change his mind” and say that actually, from now on, it is beautiful and good after all. It is because the divine goodness and beauty are unchanging facets of reality at its most intimate level. The fact that some people may choose to close their eyes or to live in the shade does not mean that the sun no longer shines; and even those who open the shutters of their heart to some of its light may choose, for a variety of profound psychological reasons, to keep some secret corners in the dark.

So how do we know what is truly beautiful and what is merely a matter of personal taste? St Thomas Aquinas gives a characteristically terse definition of the Beautiful as id quod visum placet: “that which delights you when you see it.” Delight is not to be confused with simple pleasure or some cosmetic satisfaction. At a visceral level, we know that some things which give us pleasure are not good at all, even if they happen to satisfy some short-term craving. I think Aquinas is talking about that sheer delight which brightens up the soul, that kind of heart-felt joy which irresistibly illuminates your face with smiles, laughter or even tears. The joy that your beloved or your children can bring. Beauty brings delight, and that delight is itself transformative. Beauty makes beautiful.

And because beauty itself makes beautiful, schools need to awaken in each child a love of beauty in the way which is most particularly fitting to them and then give them the opportunity to pursue it.

One implication of this is that Christian schools cannot succumb to the utilitarian tendency of downplaying arts and humanities subjects in favour of more obviously economically beneficial pursuits. It saddened me when I taught at a leading English public school that the children of the wealthy would often be steered away from their true talents in art or music because their parents wanted them to become lawyers or doctors so that they could make even more money. I wonder, how many great musicians and artists has our country lost to greed? I fear that Carey’s book is yet more fuel for the utilitarian attitude towards art which would excise it entirely from the curriculum of our schools in favour of something more obviously “profitable.” 

More controversially, within those subjects, we need to make informed curriculum decisions about the aesthetic models we offer pupils as their guidance and creative inspiration. Back in the 1990s, I was a Goth. I started learning exclusively black clothes around the age of 11 and got into the Cure a couple of years later. They’re still one of my favourite bands to this day, along with a lot of the “New Metal” I got into as I got older. In my teenage years, I read and wrote dark horror fiction, drew horror-themed pictures and ran dark, low-fantasy tabletop roleplaying games; and I’ve never fully grown out of these interests, as I still write Lovecraftian short stories and run occasional Call of Cthulhu games for a group of likeminded clergy to this day. Nor, as a priest, have I grown out dressing in black. But as a teenager, I also went through periods of terrible depression. A state all-boys boarding school was not the best place for someone with my esoteric interests. Where rugby and science were gods, I venerated Latin and music. Whether my pursuit of the Goth aesthetic was a symptom or a cause of my depression, I am not sure.

In those days, I was in a small minority with my propensity towards dark subject matter. Now, visiting schools, I see that the darkness in teenagers’ artwork has become mainstream. Given my own past, my views on this are mixed. On the one hand, my own efforts at teenage self-expression were very similar, and I think that they helped me to deal with the internal darkness of my own depression and anxieties creatively and relatively harmlessly. On the other, I cannot help but worry that so many teenagers nowadays seem to be expressing the darkness that I felt at their age. Is it yet another symptom of the startling decline in teenage mental health that so much of the world is experiencing?

I wonder how differently my own psyche might have developed with different influences. In those days, I was firmly, even militantly, atheist. As far as I was concerned, this world was it, and frankly was not really up to much. I disliked life and found light childish and reprehensible. Yet I had quite a refined sense of what I thought was beautiful: I admired certain forms of classical music as well as Goth and metal, and was a snob about “mainstream” pop.

Ironically, the Gothic aesthetic that I so much admired was a diluted form of mediaeval Christian art and architecture, but I could not see that at the time. The mediaeval memento mori, intended as a reminder that we will be judged for the afterlife, was for us Goths nothing but a rather kitch mockery of mortality, a reminder to take advantage of life while you still have time. It played into the cult of youth and the abuse of beauty. The idea that beauty was connected to goodness or to truth did not cross my mind. All I saw was the opposition between an arbitrary moralism, which I rejected, or the nothingness of atheism. I chose the dark because the light seemed too harsh, and you could get away with so much more in the shadows. 

Our questions about the role of beauty in the school’s curriculum are therefore somewhat tentative in the end. On the one hand, if it helps teenagers to pour out the darkness of their hearts onto paper, into sculpture, or in their music and creative writing, then we must make no decisions which hamper that. And however worried we might be about the extent of the darkness pouring out, we should be very wary of criticising it lest we hamper its creative expression and it ends up being let out in far more destructive ways. When pupils do let this darkness out, we need to make sure that it is met with a sympathetic pastoral response.

Yet surely we can, from the earliest age, also provide models of beauty which do, as St Thomas Aquinas put it, bring delight when seen. Surely we can encourage delight and wonder in the underlying harmony of reality. We can explore how great an influence the world’s spiritual traditions have played in the history of art, music and architecture. We can try something as simple as asking pupils to represent or create something that brings them that true delight, or something they think will bring delight to others. We can show that creativity is not limited to financial productivity, and free pupils from the anxiety of always working towards marketable goods. We can help pupils find the beauty that will transfigure them and bring them ever closer to the good and the true. For it is beauty, true beauty, which leads us to love the One who is Love and source of all that truly is.