St Benedict, contemplation and the search for knowledge should be the bedrock of a 21st-century Catholic education, says Mark Jenkins
The 17th-century mystic poet Thomas Traherne said that there is no knowledge without an understanding of the place of the known in an invisible, inner hierarchy of being: “He knoweth nothing as he ought to know, who thinks he knoweth anything/ Without seeing its place and the manner how it relateth to God, angels and men,/And to the creatures in earth, heaven and hell, time and eternity.” For Traherne, an education is not merely the acquiring of “knowledge”, the gathering and correlating of facts. Instead, an education is coming to see the significance of the whole, which requires faith in the existence of that, largely unseen, whole.
