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Cardinal Newman, who will be canonized on October 13, is well known for his philosophy of education, especially for his masterwork The Idea of University (1853). But his most profound reflections on education are in his minor work “The Mission of St. Benedict” (1858), in which Newman treats the question of how to teach a beginner, even a beginner under the most unfavorable circumstances. Not a novice in dialectic and rhetoric, or in the theoretical or practical sciences, but a beginner in the quotidian flow of life.
In the declining shadows of Roman order in the West, the fifth-century monk St. Benedict authored a “simple Rule for beginners.” How to divide a day, how to honor one’s fellows of different social classes, how to bury the dead, how to distinguish tools and persons, and many other things that bewilder us today. Newman claimed that St. Benedict was the genius of “poetical” education, which directs the first and maybe even final steps of living ordinary life as an integrated whole.