Life Illumined
SCHOLA DEI
The text is below is a lecture delivered at Princeton this afternoon, in the context of a conference organised by the Aquinas Institute: Beyond the Impasse: Theological Perspectives on DEI.
The monastery as SCHOLA DEI
In his prologue to the Holy Rule, written up in the late fifth century and destined to become, unbeknownst to its author, a key source for the development of European civilisation, St Benedict calls the monastery, a term still possessed in his day of beguiling potential, dominici schola servitii. This phrase is usually rendered, ‘a school of the Lord’s service’, suggesting the image of a bearded old monk at his board taking novices through the ABC of ascetic living. The association is not entirely false, but inadequate. A schola in Latin Antiquity was not an institution much like what we think of now as a ‘school’. Something of the ancient sense was kept in Italian. Visitors to Venice will know the Scuola of San Rocco or of San Teodoro. The Venetian scuole were lay associations that sometimes resembled trade unions, sometimes foreigners’ clubs, microsocieties within the framework of the Republic, providing for their members welfare, a social network, and professional support. Think, too, of Renaissance painters whose pupils produced work under their instruction, canvases curators now attribute to ‘The School of Michelangelo’ or ‘The School of Titian’. These associations help us to understand the Benedictine project on its own terms
The schola Benedict speaks of is a place in which knowledge is imparted, yes; even more essentially it is a place of enterprise in which something new is created. That something is a novel model of community binding men freely together by means of a covenant of life and a clear purpose. For take note: Benedict stresses that his Rule is for ‘the strong race of coenobites’, that is, of people resolved to foster togetherness, be it at some cost to their preference or comfort. The word ‘coenobite’ derives from Greek. It is made up of two elements: the adjective κοινός, meaning ‘common’ in the sense of ‘shared’; and βίος, which means ‘life’, as in ‘biology’, discourse about living things. In the first chapter of the rule, Benedict contrasts coenobites with three other types of monks. Let us consider them briefly.
First, there are hermits going ‘from the battle line in the ranks of their brothers to the single combat of the desert’. Benedict’s choice of martial imagery is revealing. It is foolish to go out into the desert, a dangerous place, without having first rubbed shoulders with others in a school of discipline. The Christian hermit is no mere opter-out. His combat is motivated by universal charity. Separated from everything, in Evagrius’s phrase, he is united with all and makes his oblation on behalf of all. For this end to be realised, his love must be awakened, purified, and tested in human company. The Christian ethos is wary of abstractions. It calls for authentication in terms of real philanthropy. This requirement sets it apart from ideologies whose end may be sublime, but whose means for arriving at it are botched, like that of the Rusanovs in Solzhenitsyn’s Cancer Ward, who loved ‘the People, their great People, served the People and were ready to give their lives for the People’, but who ‘found themselves less and less able to tolerate actual human beings, those obstinate creatures who were always resistant, refusing to do what they were told to and, besides, demanding something for themselves.’ Cenobitic discipline relieves a man of illusions about mankind, and about himself. It teaches him to face humanity in its complexity, with its inward and outward contradictions, its noises and smells, and with its capacity for greatness. Instead of tediously dreaming up a notional ‘People’, he learns, through battle, to love people as they are.
Next there are the sarabites. No one really knows what this name means, but it stands for an aberration. Benedict calls the sarabites detestable, ‘monachorum taeterrimum genus’, a strong word to flow from the quill of one so measured in speech. When we read how he describes them, we are embarrassed. For the Sarabites are uncannily like us. Their character is ‘soft as lead’. Though religious in appearance, they display by their actions that they are ‘still loyal to the world’. They huddle in small groups of likeminded folk, so as not to be disturbed in their notions. ‘Their law is what they like to do, whatever strikes their fancy. Anything they believe in and choose, they call holy; anything they dislike, they consider forbidden.’ The paradigm lets us name groups we meet in daily life, who ‘pen themselves up in their own sheepfold’. The temptation is real. Vigilance is called for.
Finally, Benedict presents the gyrovagues. A gyrovagus is literally someone who goes round and round. He despises linearity and is therefore unlikely to make any kind of meaningful progress. A gyrovague is at one and the same time a lone wolf, a window-shopper, and a sponge. Gyrovagues, we read in the rule, are ‘always on the move, never settle down, slaves to their self-will and gross appetites’. They strategically knock on lots of different doors, ever guests in others’ houses, never staying long, but always filling their tummies, unable to set up a lasting home for themselves. Here, too, we recognise a type of person abroad in our time, where circular movement damned to non-arrival unfolds, not only in material space or within the intricate confines of a person’s mind, but in the vast, waterless wastes of the internet. In every way, says Benedict, gyrovagues ‘are worse than sarabites’. They bar themselves from ever reaching happiness. Enough said.
This brief purview, a Benedictine sociology of types, gives us an idea of key lessons imparted in the dominici schola servitii. One learns, there, the self-knowledge vital for any societal enterprise; one learns perseverance and humility by staying over time in committed fellowship with others; one learns to temper one’s appetites and to still one’s anger; one learns to serves charitably; and one learns patience, that Christian hallmark, potentially of great moral stature.
In Christian terms, it is legitimate, I think, to relabel this school a SCHOLA DEI. The Genitive construction sustains, in Latin, two senses. It can refer to the object of learning: in this instance, life according to God’s call, revealed in Christ. And it can refer to the teaching subject, God himself, working through human instruments and circumstances. It is not, then, by mere facetiousness that I have titled my talk by adopting the acronym of our conference theme. In fact, the values of diversity, equity, and inclusion do condition Benedict’s enterprise. For a millennium and a half his rule has proved a paradigm for contented human coexistence. Might it have something to tell us regarding challenges we face now, AD 2024? I think so. So I shall consider the elements of DEI in a Benedictine perspective. It makes sense to set out from ‘inclusion’. Therefore I shall work through the letters backwards.
Inclusion
The Benedictine monastery is in principle, and in practice, a place where everyone is welcome in. It is hospitable. A monastery ‘is never without guests’, says Benedict, for whom that affirmation is simply a description of how things are and should be. This tight-knit, regular society has a porous boundary. Part of its ascesis is readiness to be disturbed by people turning up needing time, attention, and compassionate help. For the guests we are talking about are not just devout retreatants calling in for a few days of restful silence. The rule speaks of ‘poor people and pilgrims’, the latter term meaning, ‘people arrived from abroad’, on a journey God knows where, perhaps just in search of livelihood. In these, we are told, Christ is most particularly received. They are to be welcome with ‘great care and concern’, graciously.
How this is to be done is shown in two specific counsels. We find the first in the chapter on the porter, who is a living conduit between the resident community and the world round about. He is the monastery’s public face and at the same time, before the community, ambassador of those who turn up at the door. He should be a senex sapiens, ‘a wise elder’. This title has a venerable aspect suggesting maturity of insight and charity. It carries, too, a note of humorous realism. The porter’s age, says Benedict, ‘will keep him from roaming about’. He will be apt to sit quietly in his lodge — doing what? Primarily, his business is to wait. He is there to ensure that no one who knocks will be without a friendly welcome and a good word.
As soon as anyone knocks, or a poor man calls out, he replies, ‘Thanks be to God’ or ‘Your blessing, please’; then, with all the gentleness that comes from the fear of God, he provides a prompt answer with the warmth of love.
Gentleness, promptness, and the warmth of love are to be extended to everyone. The porter is mobilised on these terms before he has even seen with whom he is dealing. Greeting the knock with the cry, ‘Deo gratias’, he employs the formula used at Mass to acclaim the Word of God. In the needs of a stranger he welcomes, and seeks to understand, a divine call. He may also shout, ‘Benedic’, that is, ‘Your blessing, please!’, conscious that each human being, however destitute, is the bearer of some unique goodness to be received as a gift from God. From the start, the encounter between insider and outsider is marked by reciprocity and, thus, by respect.
A guest is by definition a bird of passage. What of those come to settle? Here there is a noteworthy contrast. Where the guest is received with exquisite kindness, the aspiring novice is tested. The rule commands: ‘Do not grant newcomers an easy entry’. Then it goes on to prescribe treatment that may seem to us a little savage:
if someone comes and keeps knocking at the door, and if at the end of four or five days he has shown himself patient in bearing his harsh treatment and difficulty of entry, and has persisted in his request, then he should be allowed to enter and stay in the guesthouse for a few days.
During his time of waiting he will either have been camping outside or have kept coming and going. The keyword in this passage is ‘patient’. The procedure Benedict outlines intends to help the candidate examine himself and his motives. Is this what he really wants? Does he have the staying-power for it? These are key questions to ask of anyone seeking to become part of a stable human community.
One who perseveres through testing is to be let into the novitiate, there to be looked after by ‘a senior chosen for his skill in winning souls’. This seasoned monk has one principal task: to verify ‘whether the novice truly seeks God’. This is really Benedict’s sole criterion of vocation discernment. It has an eminently practical side. The novice must work out whether what he seeks is what the community proposes, whether his personal goals are aligned to those among whom he wishes to pitch his tent. Fruitful, peaceful coexistence presupposes unity of vision. A newcomer is therefore, for his own good, taught a lesson of realism. Outwardly, this involves an account of ‘the hardships and difficulties that will lead him to God’. He is to be made acquainted with the monastic rule. During his novitiate, it is read through to him thrice in entirety. He is told: ‘This is the law under which you are choosing to serve. If you can keep it, come in. If not, feel free to leave.’ The stress on freedom is capital. It flows from the groundswell of the Christian condition. But this imperative of freedom is spelled out in view of oblation, not of narcissistic self-realisation. Human beings exist, from a Christian point of view, for self-giving, for the binding in truth of their affection: sarabitical withdrawal or vague gyrovagueries cannot satisfy the yearning of their soul. To grow up, a man needs to purify and freely direct his will.
The novice must for this reason come to know himself. What animates me? What makes me afraid? What do I desire? Where am I shackled? Where do I need restraint? The grand seventh chapter of the rule, ‘On Humility’, is a manual of such enquiry, to be conducted before God in a logic of trustful obedience to a spiritual father, for ‘inclusion’ here entails entrusting oneself to a personal communion, not just carving out a space for oneself. A monastic pedagogy of self-knowledge differs from manoeuvring within the number-coded web of the enneagram. It is performed to enable, not merely self-acceptance, which is but a propaedeutic stage, but self-transcendence. That is why fraternal relations are always the acid test of genuine progress. The rule’s injunctions are clear: ’Help the troubled and console the sorrowing. […] Do not act in anger or bear a grudge. Rid your heart of all deceit. Never give a hollow greeting of peace or turn away when someone needs your love.’ When such responses, by the interplay of determination and grace, slowly become second nature, the monk ceases to be a borrowed ace within an unsteady house of cards. He becomes instead a constituent part of a living body, transplanted into what Benedict calls the corpus monasterii as a living member. And is it not indeed the case that genuine ‘inclusion’ is a matter of incorporation, requiring vital, subtle transfusions from the receiving organism and back, for the thriving of the whole?
Equity
The word ‘equity’ is polyvalent. It is commonly used in the discourse of finance to indicate stocks or shares shifted, bought, and sold to make an income. On hearing ‘equity’ spoken, we are conditioned to ask: ‘What’s in it for me?’ In the context of DEI, the ethical sense of ‘equity’ is to the fore, naturally. Still, the economic, we might say capitalist resonance should be born in mind. This concords with a definition of ‘equity’ I found in a 2022 article published by McKinsey & Company:
Equity refers to fair treatment for all people, so that the norms, practices, and policies in place ensure identity is not predictive of opportunities or workplace outcomes. Equity differs from equality in a subtle but important way. While equality assumes that all people should be treated the same, equity takes into consideration a person’s unique circumstances, adjusting treatment accordingly so that the end result is equal.
But equal on what terms? There is scope here for application corresponding to that of Orwell’s pigs, who in an equity manifesto declared all animals equal, but some a just a bit ‘more equal’ than others. The McKinsey definition of equity ties up with notions of entitlement. Its point of departure is ‘identity’. No one’s identity should a priori be ‘predictive of opportunities or […] outcomes’. At this point tension arises. ‘Opportunities’ belong in the realm of objective reference, whereas ‘identity’, in the world in which we live, is largely subjective. As such, it is holy ground, for no one must challenge another’s perceived or projected sense of self. This is not the time to go into this problem. My point is this, simply: in today’s secular speech, ‘identity’ spells acquisition, the shares I invest in corporate enterprise, expecting these to correspond without any prejudice to my expected margin of gain.
If we turn back to the rule we find ourselves engaging with other categories. As legislator, Benedict is concerned with justice. To apply this virtue in practice, he conceives of ‘equity’ in terms of ‘equilibration’. Benedict is less seduced by ‘equality’ than modern theoreticians. Experience has taught him that it can be an oppressive term, insensitive to the requirements of circumstance. Take his chapters on the right measure of food and drink. He provides a norm, a pretty ample one (a pound of bread and a half-bottle of wine per monk per day), only to stress that ‘everyone has his own gift from God, one this and another that’, so that it is ‘with some unease that we specify the amount of food and drink for others’: what is right for one is too little, or too much, for his neighbour. When work is heavy and the weather hot, the abbot may exercise discretion, making sure that each receives what he needs, taking care only ‘that over-indulgence is avoided, lest a monk experience a surfeit.’
This pragmatic passage expresses the tenor of the rule in matters of equity by positing as a marker of identity first giftedness, then weakness. The incorporation of a member enriches the body; at the same time, the frailties of each affect the whole. The receiving of a gift calls for gratitude; confrontation with necessity, for mercy. These complementary responses build up monastic society and point, in concert, towards a principle that defines it: Benedict stresses that the monks must ‘honour’ one another. They are to be respectful, that is, of each other’s irreducible alterity, conscious of the mystery each embodies, discerning in each other a reflection of the Image in which all are uniquely made. Gratitude, mercy, honour: if we are concerned about equity, these are the qualities by which it is recognised.
In terms of ‘opportunities’ and ‘outcomes’, Benedict’s focus is not on private gain. Indeed, those who enter Benedictine society forego prospects of gain for ever, offering up their persons in their intellectual, moral, and physical aspects. Petty ambition, like that of the artisan seeking distinction from his wares, and secret hoarding, stashes under the mattress, compromise the monk’s supernatural and civic engagement. Sliding down such slopes, he dishonours himself. The finality of his life is transcendent: ‘That in all things God should be glorified’. This aim is pursued in a life of worship; in enterprise striving to instantiate work the way Adam first knew it, as beatitude (for it was sin that made work drudgery); in shared happiness, the yearning for ‘good days’ being a vocational requirement for monks; and in gradual delivery from that cruelest of tyrants, which Benedict calls voluntas propria, ‘self-will’, the ensemble of my intimate addictions and obsessions, idées fixes, and reasons for self-pity, patterns of thought and behaviour that shut me up in myself and off from others. Such mortification of self-will is no obliteration of personhood. Benedict would utterly recoil from the idea of making of a man an automaton. That which must go is my tendency to see myself as the sun in a universe of extinguished stars, a temptation that, for all its patent absurdity, is surprisingly hard to eliminate.
Since freedom from attachment is part of the goal a monk pursues, personal forfeiture of ‘equity’ in the McKinseyan sense can be laudable. Benedict devotes a chapter to the question, ‘Whether all should receive necessaries equally?’, inviting a realist perspective infused with charity, concerned with legitimate needs. Then he lays down: ‘Let whoever needs less thank God and not be distressed; let whoever needs more feel humble because of his weakness, not self-important because of kindness shown him.’ Both need and the absence of need become opportunities to foster a eucharistic mindset investing a person, and potentially a community of persons, with graciousness, an endowment mere calculation is powerless to bestow.
As far as deliberations are concerned, Benedict is wholly equitable. While the monastery is governed hierarchically, with the abbot seen to ‘hold the place of Christ’, it is not totalitarian. The abbot is above all bound to the rule and recalled to his fallibility. In all matters of consequences he is to take counsel. The brothers have a right and duty to express their opinions. All are to be heard, even the newly arrived ‘since the Lord often reveals what is better to the younger.’ For a fifth-century Roman text, this statement is extraordinary, redolent with the radicalism that ever complements monks’ conservative instincts. Secular or inherited status shall play no role at all: ‘a man born free is not to be given higher rank than a slave who becomes a monk’. Were Benedict writing now, he might have added that felt inherited disadvantage should no more be a reason for preferential treatment. He urges us constantly to see beyond conditioning: to perceive ourselves afresh, at once unafraid of our poverty and determined to rise to our human and Christian dignity, thereby apt to see others, too, with purity of vision, loving inquisitiveness, and hope.
Diversity
Anyone seeing a monastic community processing into church for vespers will be struck by its uniformity. The monks wear the same clothes, follow the same pace, replicate the same gestures, and, ideally, sing in tune. Anyone who knows a community personally, meanwhile, will be struck by its often frankly improbable variety. There is something about monastic life that, when it works, liberates character. For years I have reflected on something Ingmar Bergman once said about his films: the elaboration of complex material calls for rigour of form. Monastic life provides for those called to it a formative structure enabling personhood to flourish.
To consider Benedictine intellectual and artistic output over a millennium and a half is to behold great diversity of sensibilities and temperaments. Further, monks and nuns have inculturated themselves into every continent, able to integrate ethnic, linguistic, and cultural diversity while maintaining a brand instantly recognisable as Benedictine. There is something Terentian about monasticism. The dictum, ‘Nothing human is foreign to me’, is reflected in its annals. Monastic hagiography puts in relief every human variant. Diversity is from the outset a monastic trait. This point does not need to be laboured. I would like instead to focus on safeguards envisaged to keep diversity within helpful bounds, preventing it from undermining the community’s oneness and from descending into mere singularity.
‘Singularity’ in monastic parlance is a pernicious expression of self-will as I defined it above. By singular comportment, I deviate from the common rhythm and rule. I yield to a childish desire for attention, wanting to be seen. I wish others to recognise my talents or wounds; to admire or feel sorry for me. Making of me the focus of existence, I seek affirmation and comfort. I ask for dispensations from the common life, which has come to seem to me heavy and dull; or I simply isolate myself, pleading personal need or some irreducible vulnerability. I feel overlooked, under-appreciated, and unwanted. Before long I shall be indulging in a vice Benedict censures strictly, knowing what havoc it can wreak: I shall start to murmur.
Murmuring is a form of passive aggression amply instantiated in the Bible. A murmur is different from a lament. To lament is to call out in distress, to articulate pain, to let anguish out in a cry for help, be it hyperbolically or even irrationally. That is an honest business: the puss must out. Murmuring by contrast is self-indulgent, calculating, and vindictive. The murmurer shirks responsibility, blaming others for real or felt misfortune. He or she instrumentalises hardship, or perceived slights, to spread discontent and undermine authority, pointing the finger at others, the way Israel did in the desert, pining for the cucumbers of Egypt, bored with the exodus they had freely chosen to share, hissing at Moses: ‘You have brought us out into this wilderness’.
In the setting of monasticism, Benedict flags the risk of murmuring in these situations, readily transferrable to other walks of life: when a monk is asked, for the common good, to undertake a task he feels is beneath him; when he feels someone else receives preferential treatment he would want for himself; when he thinks too much is asked of him; when he does not get his ration of wine. By murmuring he effectively retracts the oblation of self that is the covenantal glue of his vocation, the foundation for the ‘good days’ he once sought ecstatically, outside himself, looking up and around. Descending from the crystalline altitudes of God, he retreats into the moist armpit of self. When appeals to self-centred ‘difference’ diverts a man from society and spawns tyrannical claims to privilege, it engages passions of the soul that militate against spiritual freedom. Caught in these, I have eyes only for myself. My own murmuring soon becomes the only tune to which my ears are attuned.
It is tiresome to live with murmurers. Yet murmuring does its worst harm to those indulging in it. It locks them out of the real into a world of fantasy. That is why Benedict encounters it with his strongest sanction: excommunication. An inveterate murmurer is to be warned twice in private. The point is to try to make him see the harm he does himself and others; if that does not work, he is to be rebuked before all. ‘If even then he does not reform, let him be excommunicated.’ Excommunication is enacted in degrees, according to the seriousness of the fault. First it entails exclusion from the common table; next, from both table and oratory, causing the brother to eat and pray alone. In serious cases, a monk is excluded from all human contact: ‘No brother should associate or converse with him at all’; to do so would itself provoke a sanction. This punishment has an educative purpose. It is meant to make the monk understand: by acting like this you break down fellowship. Excommunication should be an eye-opener, inducing the wanderer to come back into the fold. It is a means by which the abbot exercises his ministry as shepherd, striving by all means to bring the stray sheep back, be it by picking it up and carrying it on his shoulders.
Benedict would not be Benedict, though, were he to leave it at that. The chapters on excommunication are followed by one ‘On the abbot’s care for the excommunicated’. It is a remarkable text. Benedict acknowledges that the abbot has sometimes to be inflexible, fixing and guarding limits. At the same time he must seek to reach, comfort, and guide the one shut out. Unable to do so himself, as the rule’s guardian, he sends ambassadors, wise monks dispatched ‘under the cloak of secrecy’ to support the wavering brother ‘lest he be overwhelmed by excessive sorrow’. He delicately qualifies the sternness of a righteous judge with ‘the skill of a wise physician’. His task is to unite his diverse companions in harmony, to let the genius of each enrich and embellish the whole. Diversity is problematic only when it generates centrifugal tendencies, fragmenting instead of complementing, fostering secession, not a desire to belong. To maintain the delicate balance of plurality in oneness, a corporate purpose is needed that exceeds the mere sum of constituent parts. The body must be called to rise towards transfiguration, engaged all the while in a mission to ensure the health of each member in view of integral flourishing. Where a toe is fixated on being just a toe, absorbed perhaps by the discomfort of an ingrown nail, it deprives itself of the joy of bearing up a physiognomy in forward movement, proceeding coordinatedly along a royal road bound for home.
Conclusion
DEI stands for values germane to a Benedictine model of society. Each, though, has a destructive flip side. Good for building up communion, ‘inclusion’ is noxious as a slogan of entitlement. ‘Equity’ is splendid as a marker of societal equilibration; hijacked in view of private gain it can become a tool of manipulation. ‘Diversity’ is lovely showing forth the complementarity of gifts; enclosing people in self-affirming apartness its fruits are bitter, causing indigestion in the body politic. To be beneficial, the just exercise of these qualities has to be learnt. It is not anodyne, then, to speak of a SCHOLA DEI. We need purposeful formation to be equitable, inclusive and diverse in truth, even as we must be taught how to be, and help others be, truly free.
A rhetorical, caricatural exploitation of these terms has led to an impasse. The word is well chosen: it indicates a point from which normally no forward movement is possible, only retraction. Positions are locked, passions run high. There are shouting matches. To respond to rhetoric and caricature cynically by these same means is unproductive, though, and ridiculous, really. It is worth reflecting that pedalling back is the sole way out of an impasse only if the obstacle cannot be overcome. But what if it can? We read in a Psalm of David, ‘With my God I can scale any wall’. The principle is timeless. Discouragement is for the faint-hearted.
There is too much good at stake, too much good will existing in the midst of some patent craziness, for us to watch placidly while the terms of DEI are undermined, then shoved into the compost. And is there not a growing heap? For a while DEI has been politically and commercially exploited. Why not use it if it sells? Customers show signs of having had enough, though. The recent foreswearing of DEI by, say, Toyota likely indicates a growing trend. It is in the nature of slogans, especially acronyms, to last but a season. Seasons in trade and fashion are short.
The vacuity of much discourse on this theme results from the absence of a viable meta-narrative, of an overarching anthropological vision. To make sense, the terms of DEI must be defined. Inclusion into what? Equity by what just standard? Diversity according to what norm? These are questions our pragmatic times are ill equipped to handle and from which public figures shirk. For to pass from the register of ‘How?’ to that of ‘Why?’ presupposes commitment to a worldview, and even to envisage such a thing is considered by many to be manifestly anti-DEI. This is the irony, in some sense the tragedy, we must address. The task is for all, but for Christians especially, held as they are to a vision of a new heaven and a new earth, which prospect is not reserved for the eschaton. The Church is to be, here and now, ‘a lasting, sure seed of unity, hope and salvation for the whole human race’. That’s an instruction! Hope seems to me here the crucial term. Many of our time’s ideological excesses are customised attempts to recreate it, for it is long gone from politics. We miss it, be it subliminally. Yet hope cannot be decreed as strategy. It must be born.
For centuries, the civilisational mission of the Church has found expression in charitable enterprise, in liturgy and the arts, in intellectual endeavour. It has expressed itself, too, no less durably, in the repristination of vocabulary, enabling Christians to rescue from mythicised mists precious notions needed to speak afresh a common, desirable human purpose. Controversies provoked by DEI show the want of such purpose in a society whose fabric is unravelling in all directions at once, from which whole spools of thread are brusquely extracted, in which patterns of nobility or beauty no longer appear to the naked eye. St Benedict lived in a world that, in this respect, resembled ours, a twilight world. His response was, in the words of a Psalm, to ‘awake the dawn’ while reminding man, for whom it is not good to be alone, experientially of what it is to be human, fully and happily human, in order, next, to frame that proposition by way of a sharable ideal. The method has worked in the past, drawing forth from different sensibilities a most gracious quality: unanimitas, a oneness of soul that makes heavy things light. Who knows? It might work again. For truly, what is needed now is more than merely a wearily doctored political agenda. What is needed is a new sense of the very notion of a polis. What is needed is a rebirth of man. Needed is a credibly embodied, corporate witness to true humanity.
