Stratford Caldecott’s Idea of Education

Abstract

This essay overviews key aspects of Stratford Caldecott’s idea of liberal arts education, within the Roman Catholic tradition and especially focuses on the centrality of the Eucharist in his thought. It also considers how, according to Caldecott, liberal arts education contains a kind of liturgical affordance or sympathy with the form and nature of worship (within Roman Catholicism). In so doing, this paper offers, to date, the most substantive scholarly introduction to key aspects of Caldecott’s Eucharistic idea of education, within the context of the liberal arts tradition (broadly conceived).

1. Introduction

Stratford Caldecott (1953–2014) spanned a remarkably wide range of fields in his writings, with an equally remarkable depth of insight. From geometry to ecology, from theology to the arts, from liturgy to education and inter-religious dialogue, he focused on the mutually donative relationship between faith and reason, between Catholicism and culture. Together with his wife, Léonie Caldecott, he played a significant role, from the late 1980s, onwards, in the Catholic, cultural scene within Britain and beyond its shores. They both extensively wrote about the unique role Catholicism played in enabling human flourishing, the cultural life of society, and liberal education. The various topics they focused on intentionally resonated with the focus and themes of Vatican II (especially as expressed in Gaudium et Spes) and of the new evangelization ushered in by Pope John Paul II, throughout his lengthy pontificate. While the significance of Stratford Caldecott’s writings on contemporary, Catholic culture in Britain is increasingly recognized by scholars from diverse disciplines and contexts, sustained engagement with his thought remains a relatively new and emerging field.

So far, the collected volume, The Beauty of God’s House: Essays in Honor of Stratford Caldecott (Murphy 2014), is one of the most sustained, scholarly engagements with central themes and concerns in his work—including, but not limited to, ecology, theological aesthetics, liturgical theology, ecumenism, Mariology, economics, inter-religious dialogue, and the formative influence of both John Henry Newman and JRR Tolkien on Caldecott’s vision of the interpenetration between faith and culture in history. The volume draws together a host of theologians (both religious and lay), including Léonie Caldecott, Marc Cardinal Ouellet, John Milbank, David L Schindler, Aidan Nichols, and Carol Zaleksi, among others, who examine various aspects of what Francesca Aran Murphy calls “the manifestation of the beauty of God”, a manifestation which the Caldecotts sought to discern, study, and share in their work (Murphy 2014, p. 2). While this volume lays a helpful foundation for the development of Caldecott Studies, there are topics of importance to Caldecott’s thought which remain under-considered in this volume and in extant, scholarly appraisals of his life and thought. The importance of the Catholic vision of education for the renewal of contemporary culture (broadly conceived) is one of these under-considered topics.

In what follows, therefore, this paper will overview key aspects of Caldecott’s idea of education within the Catholic tradition, placing special emphasis on the distinctly Eucharistic dimensions of his approach and vision. In so doing, it will offer new directions in Caldecott studies, showing the degree to which Caldecott’s emphasis on the centrality of the Eucharist in Catholic education is not only a reiteration of perennial, Catholic teaching but also a substantive contribution to the discourses on education which have taken place in the Catholic context in recent decades (especially in light of the conciliar theology of the Second Vatican Council).

2. Caldecott and “The Religious Dimension of Education”

A central and abiding theme runs across and connects Caldecott’s work in theology, literature, philosophy, and cultural studies: namely, the way in which Catholicism serves as leaven for cultures throughout history. This is particularly true of his idea of education. In his “Introduction” to Beauty for Truth’s Sake: On the Re-Enchantment of Education, he writes that “[e]ducation is our path to true humanity and wisdom”, a path which is profoundly illuminated by Catholicism’s integration of faith and reason in the service of charity (Caldecott 2009, pp. 11, 16). As he once noted in Communio, the Christian relationship with God uniquely “enfolds and transforms the life of the cosmos” and “answers the need of the human heart for the supernatural” (“Creation as a Call to Holiness”, Caldecott 2003, p. 161). Such an understanding of Christianity as an inherently relational, intellectual, and also personal faith is especially seen in Caldecott’s writings on education as well as in the outreach, projects, and aims of the institute he co-founded with his wife, Léonie, in the early 1990s. Titled Second Spring: The Centre for Faith and Culture, the institute seeks to integrate Church teachings with the lived experience and culture of people of all faiths and none, within but also beyond the British, Roman Catholic context. Together, their scholarship and outreach drew extensively from John Henry Newman’s writings on the place and value of Catholicism for the renewal of culture. In this, the Caldecotts sought to contribute to the expansion of the “longer perspective” of Newman’s Second Spring sermon preached at the first Synod of the re-established Roman Catholic Hierarchy in England in 1852 (“Second Spring n.d.”).

In taking their cues from Newman, they have often explained that their shared mission of widening educational horizons within the Catholic Church was to “look […] for a Second Spring beyond the Second Vatican Council, whilst seeing the Council as a necessary stage in its preparation” (ibid.) According to Stratford, education in all of its stages and forms is at the heart of the new evangelization and of the extension of the spirit of Newman’s vision of renewed springtime for Catholicism today. As he noted in an interview about the origins of The Centre for Faith and Culture, both he and Léonie understood John Paul II’s “concept of a ‘new evangelization’” to mean “a ‘cultural’ evangelization”, to “bring out the beauty of the [Catholic] faith” to people from all backgrounds (Drame 2001, “An Interview with Stratford and Léonie Caldecott”). Such a cultural evangelization, according to the Caldecotts, is especially brought about through a careful re-examination and recovery of the nature and aims of education at all levels, within domestic contexts and educational institutions alike.

This is particularly seen in Stratford Caldecott’s extensive writings on education, many of which were first published in Communio and which also drew extensively from the Congregation for Catholic Education’s (1988) Document, The Religious Dimension of Education in a Catholic Society. Key elements of Caldecott’s idea of education can be encapsulated by the following paragraph from The Religious Dimension of Education, which states that the “Catholic school finds its justification in the mission of the Church; it is based on an educational philosophy in which faith, culture and life are brought into harmony … The special character of the Catholic school and the underlying reason for its existence … is precisely the quality of the religious instruction integrated into the overall education of the students” (Congregation for Catholic Education 1988, paras. 34, 66). Commenting at length on The Religious Dimension of Education, Caldecott often reiterated the point that both liturgical worship as well as religious education uniquely integrate the multi-faceted dimensions of each human personality because “God is the unifying principle of all human knowledge, and of all human society, including the community of the school [and all educational institutions, broadly conceived]” (“Creation as a Call to Holiness”, Caldecott 2003, p. 271).

Also drawing from the conciliar theology of Vatican II, Caldecott held that the Eucharistic presence of Christ in the Church serves as the source and summit of God’s presence in the world. In this way, Christ announces that self-gift is the heart of relationality: divine self-gift is offered in the Eucharist and those who receive the Eucharist are called, in turn, to gift themselves to others, to society, to worthwhile enterprises that build up the common good (for the sake of the present and for future generations as well). Throughout his writing on education, Caldecott sees self-gift, modelled after Christ’s Eucharistic example, as diametrically opposed to systems of power and mechanization. As a result, he held that unless there is a Eucharistic model at the heart of a Catholic educational system, it will be replaced by a mechanistic one: “God is the unifying principle of all human knowledge, and of all human society, including the community of the school itself […Therefore] [t]he secularization of education mean[s] the rise of the Machine as the supreme archetype of … civilization” (ibid.). Caldecott also therefore held that the Christian, liturgical model of education—which forms the foundation of the culture of life—is rooted in Christological anthropology, an anthropology that proclaims the human person is made for relationships and belonging as opposed to, in the first instance, consuming and controlling. Whereas a mechanistic mentality is predicated on utilitarianism, the “Christian vision” (rooted in prayer and the liturgies of the Word and the Eucharist) is a culture of care in which “we exist not to consume and impose control but to build relationships” (“Philosophy for a New Evangelization”, Caldecott 2021, p. 45).

Given this, Caldecott held that Catholic philosophies of education need to be placed into deeper and more substantive conversation with liturgical theology. In Not as the World Gives: The Way of Creative Justice (Caldecott 2014), Beauty in the Word: Rethinking the Foundations of Education (Caldecott 2012), and Beauty for Truth’s Sake: On the Re-Enchantment of Education (Caldecott 2009), he offers a vision of education and human flourishing rooted in Catholic Social Teaching, the classical liberal arts tradition, and the sacramental life—all of which, he proposes, culminate in the liturgy, the celebration of the Eucharist. That noted, it is particularly in Beauty for Truth’s Sake and Beauty in the Word that he offers the most extensive justification of the way in which the liberal arts tradition anticipates, and is fully realized within, liturgy. In both works, he examines how the liberal arts tradition (and its necessary adaptation to the contemporary context) offers a particular opportunity for Catholic educators and schools—at all levels of learning and formation—to embrace the spirit of Vatican II as well as the apostolic constitution, Ex Corde Ecclesiae, promulgated by John Paul II in 1990.

Caldecott’s integration of the liberal arts tradition with liturgical theology stands out as one of his most significant contributions to contemporary philosophies of education and liturgical theology. However, as already noted, this contribution has not been sufficiently considered, let alone examined in light of what it can offer conversations on Catholic education today. Given this, in the following sections, this article will examine how Caldecott links the tradition of liberal arts education to the spirit of the liturgy, showing the degree to which prayer and worship are the source and summit of education and personal formation (broadly conceived).

3. Liturgical Affordance in the Liberal Arts Tradition

Responding to the conciliar theology of Vatican II, Caldecott’s work reminds us that the “Catholicism” of a liberal arts education “cannot simply be added on to an existing curriculum or atmosphere” (Beauty in the Word, Caldecott 2012, pp. 14–15). Rather, “because a religious faith affects everything, even changing the way we view the cosmos, it cannot be compartmentalized … Revelation subtly alters the way every subject is taught as well as the relationship between them” (ibid.). Throughout his writings, public addresses, and unpublished talks, Caldecott would often point out that, in recent decades, Catholic philosophers, theologians, and educators of various backgrounds have been seeking out ways to integrate research, learning, and formation in a Catholic way. This way both honors and promotes the freedom of the human person in his or her pursuit of truth, in his or her pursuit of the metaphysical meaning of life which is, nonetheless, usually intimated and announced through lived experience, daily life, and in specific, historical times, places and contexts (Beauty in the Word, Caldecott 2012, p. 14). Drawing extensively from the genealogy of the liberal arts in the classical world and its subsequent, medieval revival (thanks to the Roman Catholic tradition of higher learning), Caldecott is not merely historicist. Instead, his approach to the history of the liberal arts is philosophical, seeking to show the perennial, and, ultimately, metaphysical as well as historical relevance of the liberal arts, its aims, methods, and affordances. That is to say, he examines how the liberal arts are always already timely and timeless, always already contemporary in that they focus on that which bears lasting value across time, cultures, and conditions of historical change. “The liberal arts are a golden thread”, he says, in the opening of Beauty in the Word: Rethinking the Foundations of Education (Caldecott 2012), “that comes from the Greeks, from Pythagoras and his successors both Islamic and Christian, especially Augustine; a thread that weaves its way through … history … These arts were intended for the cultivation of freedom and the raising of our humanity …” (ibid., p. 9).

In making this point, Caldecott then proceeds to carefully re-evaluate the origins and value of the liberal arts, showing the ways in which they inform (and, in turn, became further formed by) the liturgical theology of Roman Catholicism, especially as developed and safeguarded by the monastic orders throughout Church history. Caldecott’s examination of the liberal arts tradition begins with the point that they are the foundations of “the idea of university education in the West” (Beauty for Truth’s Sake, Caldecott 2009, p. 20). Historically, the seven subjects of a Liberal Arts education were comprised of the Quadrivium (Arithmetic, Geometry, Astronomy, Music) and the Trivium (Grammar, Rhetoric, Logic). As these classical subjects were expanded and adopted in the medieval founding of universities, it was understood that all disciplines were held together by, and remained at the disposal of, theology (Beauty in the Word, Caldecott 2012, p. 11). These seven, foundational subjects were to “prepare the student for the higher study of philosophy and theology, through which one may become truly free, truly human” (ibid.). That is to say, the subjects of the liberal arts tradition led to, and were transcended by (or culminated in), the study of philosophy and theology. Caldecott reminds his readers that they helped people “become capable of them” and, even more expressly, in the classical or Socratic origins of the liberal arts academies, such an education was meant to be a means of living the examined life so as to make a good end, a noble death (Beauty for Truth’s Sake, Caldecott 2009, p. 21).

Bearing all this in mind, Caldecott draws from Newman’s essay on the life of St Benedict to highlight the liturgical latency or affordance inherent within the life of the mind, especially as shaped by the classical, liberal arts tradition. Newman’s emphasis on St. Benedict’s place within the history of Catholic education was an especially timely one in the nineteenth-century context as Roman Catholics were seeking models and examples of Catholic education as they sought to re-establish places of higher learning after the restoration of the Roman Catholic hierarchy. Seeing in Newman an example for how to renew Roman Catholic education in difficult times, Caldecott especially appreciated the ways in which Newman saw the inter-relations between the life of the mind and the life of prayer, as modelled in the founding of the Benedictine Order. Considering this at length, Caldecott builds off of Newman, proposing St Benedict and his Rule as a model for the safeguarding of the relationship between education—namely, the liberal arts tradition—and worship. However, in contrast to Newman, Caldecott more expressly focuses on the Eucharistic dimension of the monastic example and concludes that this very example helps to reveal the inner-depth dimension of education, showing that its ultimate end is thanksgiving for existence and worship.

Specifically, Caldecott notes that, as the founder of Western Monasticism, Benedict “formed a chain of sanctuaries” to preserve and renew the Christian faith and its developing traditions and places of education while the Roman Empire was facing its rapid, violent dissolution or fragmented dispersion (Beauty for Truth’s Sake, Caldecott 2009, pp. 38–39). In St. Benedict’s Rule can be found the synthesis between the disciplines of the liberal arts tradition and the acts of worship—constituted by the Divine Office (or Breviary), the celebration of the sacred liturgy of the Mass, and the interwoven cycles of work, prayer, study, and recreation which make up the stable, monastic routines of daily life (ibid., pp. 38–42). Moreover, as Caldecott points out, the sciences proper to each of the seven subjects within the classical liberal arts tradition were placed in the service of worship with the advent of what he terms the “Medieval Model,” which has its roots in the Benedictine heritage (Beauty for Truth’s Sake, Caldecott 2009, p. 27). Referring to Christopher Dawson’s exploration of the medieval adaptation of the seven liberal arts (which he outlines in The Crisis of Western Education), Caldecott notes that the intellectual fruits of liberal learning were animated and extended by the monastic heritage of prayer, work and contemplation.

This heritage, in turn, allowed for the creative expression and outpouring of the arts and culture alike—both of which found inspiration from an established unity between the life of the mind and the liturgical rhythms of worship. The development of the classical, liberal arts tradition flew from the liturgy and vice versa. For instance, Caldecott notes the ways in which the subjects of the quadrivium, in particular, helped advance and safeguard sacred art—that is, art at the service of worship and of the sanctuary. The methods, principles and advancements of Arithmetic, Geometry, Astronomy and Music helped create “masses of stone and statuary, rose windows and labyrinths, and in the [Gothic] interplay between light, music and sacramental gesture” (ibid.).

This much is, of course, well known in scholarship on medieval history and theology alike. However, Caldecott’s unique contribution to the story of the links between classical learning and liturgy, within the Catholic context, emerges out of his careful return to the historical context of medieval adaptations of the classical liberal arts curriculum. He reminds us that the various elements under examination in the liberal arts—ranging from mathematics to physics, from communication (or rhetoric, the art of persuasion) to music, and so on—encouraged in the student and scholar alike a careful attention to the inner coherences and unities (as well as mysteries and distinctions) between things. Measure, harmony, number, order, sense experience, the powers, and limits of observation, and other elements of study and hypothesis, were drawn upon (and drawn together) to move towards, and partially account for, the metaphysical horizon which philosophy seeks and theology reveals.

In this way, Caldecott proposes that a retrieval of the elements of the liberal arts education (adapted, as necessary, to contemporary needs) can awaken greater acts of attention, opening up the symbolic dimensions of the world. As a derivative effect, such an awakening can lead educators and students to a closer and deeper liturgical consciousness. This is because, as Caldecott notes, the liturgy serves as the highest act of attention within the Roman Catholic tradition. It is here that all which can be learned and observed about the world is put at the service of, and transcended by, Christ’s Eucharistic self-gift, a self-gift which is at the heart of the liturgical act, and which reveals the inner depths of the symbolic and sacramental order of the cosmos.

Those who may object to the idea of the liturgy as the consummation of a liberal arts education may be comforted (or at least partly appeased) by Caldecott’s proposal that for those who appreciate the classical heritage but question the value of faith there is still much to be learned from the Christian attitude of self-sacrificial gratitude (which is at the heart of authentic worship, of attentive participation in the liturgical life of the Church). Appealing to not only Benedict but also Simone Weil’s theology of attention, Caldecott explores how Eucharistic participation and encounter opens students, teachers, and scholars to the fullest mode of attention or attunement which their study and reflection, in some mysterious way, helps to awaken within them in the first place. As Weil would posit, attention is the ultimate goal of learning and living, itself: “… [t]he real goal of study is the ‘development of attention.’ Why? Because prayer consists of attention, and all worldly study is a stretching of the soul towards prayer [since] … [a]ttention is desire; it is the desire for light, for truth, for understanding, for possession … [and therefore] … orien[ts] … the soul to God” (Beauty in the Word, Caldecott 2012, pp. 30–31). In the classical tradition, the liberal arts were a means of training students in the methods, questions, and habits of attention required for thinking deeply about the nature of the world, for paying attention to existence. There is therefore a natural sympathy between the life of the mind and the desire for contemplation or worship. Given all this, in the following and final section, I will consider how, according to Caldecott, the liturgical life of the Church and the study of theology are the ultimate guarantors of Catholic, liberal education.

4. Not as the World Gives: The Liturgical Dimension of Liberal Arts Education

Drawing from Pope John Paul II’s reminder in Fides et Ratio (Paul 1998) that Catholicism is a faith which cultivates “the human capacity for metaphysical enquiry” (Paul 1998, para. 22), Caldecott holds that Christians are meant to be “‘guardians of metaphysics’ on a world scale”—first, through the “… recovery of a sense of the supernatural, and thus of their own sacraments and liturgy” so as to “look to the deepest springs of their tradition” (“The Deep Horizon”, Caldecott n.d., p. 1). As discussed in the previous section, Caldecott holds that education within the classical, Catholic liberal arts tradition tends toward “liturgical consummation “in that the liturgy of the Church is the root, the “ethos of a Catholic culture” and, as a result, offers the “source of unity and life” of the Catholic tradition (Beauty in the Word, Caldecott 2012, p. 96). Study and worship are overlapping ways in which the “human capacity for metaphysical enquiry” is furthered. Caldecott especially makes this case in Not as the World Gives: The Way of Creative Justice (Caldecott 2014), which focuses on the value of Catholic Social Teaching in our times. He takes Virgil Michel’s (1937) The Liturgy of the Church According to the Roman Rite as his starting point, drawing from the proposal that ecclesiology, liturgical theology, and appreciations of human relationships would all benefit from deeper considerations of the way in which the Eucharist uniquely points to the divine life of God—a life which is Trinitarian and therefore communal by nature. Quoting directly from Michel, Caldecott highlights the fact that the Catholic Church understands Eucharistic liturgy to manifest “the action of the Trinity in the Church. The Church in her liturgy [therefore] partakes of the life of the divine society of the three persons in one God” (Michel 1937, p. 40).

Caldecott then extends Michel’s discussion of the liturgy, putting it into conversation with his own, developing idea of education within the Roman Catholic context. Caldecott proposes that participation in the Eucharist enables the emergence of a new kind of education—and, by extension—a new kind of society within the world, a society which is the “miracle of corporate unity that takes place in the Church” (Caldecott 2014, p. 39). It is worth quoting Caldecott at some length to sufficiently consider his point that the Catholic Church is a miraculous corporation established by, and rooted in, Christ’s agapic self-sacrifice for the disclosure of truth and the salvation of the world: “[T]here would be no Church without the Mass”, Caldecott claims. “[T]he Church is nothing other than the community gathered at a million altars to offer, consecrate and receive the Bread of Life—a community that forms a body, a single corporate person, because it is absorbed into Christ …” (ibid, p. 39). It is this absorption into the person of Christ, Caldecott concludes, which enables the emergence of a new “pattern of love”—a pattern of worship which, as a derivative, serves as the motivating principle for a wholistic vision of charity within history—a vision which can guide and direct how people can live in the world and among their neighbors. “In the Mass, we learn to give ourselves, and to receive God. That complete receptivity,” he concludes, “is precisely the basis of a loving relationship with our neighbor” (ibid, p. 41).

In the Eucharist, Caldecott proposes that the faithful find the highest example of what social relations, personal relationships, and educational institutions should aim for—namely, self-donation and authentic exchange. According to Caldecott, the faithful are called, in a spirit of Eucharistic thanksgiving and worship, “[t]o heal the fragmentation of the world, to gather the scattered, to overcome the alienation between individuals and social groups” because “we need to act to create new structures and opportunities, from soup kitchens to cooperatives, from successful businesses to peace treaties. The secret to making such actions work is”, he proposes, “the unseen influence of a mystical body that already potentially incorporates everybody. In the Eucharist, we are helped to see the whole in every fragment, and Christ in every person” (Caldecott, ibid, p. 42). In all this, it can be seen that, for Caldecott, philosophical acts of attention are met in, and transcended by, participation in the liturgy. This attention is both deeply personal and, by nature, corporate also.

Indeed, Caldecott notes that one of the primary fruits of participation in the liturgy is an incorporative attitude of thanksgiving, one which can also be cultivated, in part, through immersion in a liberal arts education or formation: “[t]he liturgy, and at its heart the Mass, is the ultimate school of thanks. In the circle of giving and receiving, and being given, the one divine essence is revealed as an eternal threefold liturgy of love, prayer and praise. When we come to Mass—or to the nearest equivalent of that liturgy our faith permits—we should be able to experience a sense that here, at last, all the threads of our education are drawn together” (Beauty for Truth’s Sake, Caldecott 2009, p. 131). In the structure, methods and aims of the liturgy, then, Caldecott proposes that students and educators can find the fulfilment of their personal desires—which, paradoxically, lie within and beyond the curriculum, itself. In pursuing different aspects of the truth, the student and teacher are ideally brought into closer relationship with others, with the world, and with God. These close relationships draw persons into the kind of habit of attention, which is akin to prayer and, indeed, culminates in worship.

5. Conclusions

Caldecott’s work is therefore a reminder that the “Catholicism” of a liberal arts education “cannot simply be added on to an existing curriculum or atmosphere” (ibid., pp. 14–15). Rather, as mentioned earlier, faith “affects everything”, forming and informing the very approaches to studying as well as the understanding of the inter-relations and coherences within and across disciplines. In the Catholic tradition, then, theology is not just the founding subject of the university as we know it today. It also supplies the possibility of, and trajectory for, a vision or practical philosophy of character formation which assists educators and students alike in the pursuit of truth. As with Newman, Caldecott understands theology as the science which orders and draws together all disciplines, inspiring students to “understand” their “humanity, including [their] needs and desires” so that they can “grow and flourish” (Beauty in the Word, Caldecott 2012, p. 16). Given this, he maintains that theology, the study of the nature of God, is the ultimate aim, activity, and fulfillment of education, because “[o]ur nature is determined by relationship to others and is fulfilled by the gift of self in love”, a gift most fully realized in human participation in divine worship (ibid., p. 32). As a result, he concludes, human “freedom has no ultimate fulfillment which is purely ‘natural,’ but [rather it] is satisfied and perfected only by the giving of the self to its supernatural object: God” (ibid., p. 32). Here, he elaborates on the Catholic vision of education which Newman so presciently articulated in The Idea of a University (1852) and elsewhere, presenting a pedagogical philosophy in which theology and the liturgical life of the Church ground and unite the diverse sciences. As importantly, they supply broader, psychological and formational understandings of human flourishing, the life of devotion, and the place of imaginative creativity within study and education (ibid, pp. 7–17, 105–21).

It is a long-standing practice of twentieth-century reflections on the place of Catholic, liberal arts education within society to highlight the relationship between faith and reason and, as importantly, to note that faith widens the horizons of reason, itself, and uniquely affords a unity between reason, the will, and the heart. As just one example, in his 2009 “Address to Catholic Religion Teachers” in Rome, Pope Benedict XVI centered on the degree to which faith does not just illuminate the intellect; it also inspires the cultivation of character. “Thanks to the teaching of the Catholic religion, school and society are enriched with true laboratories of culture and humanity in which, by deciphering the significant contribution of Christianity, the person is equipped to discover goodness and to grow in responsibility, to seek comparisons and to refine his or her critical sense, to draw from the gifts of the past to understand the present better and to be able to plan wisely for the future” (Benedict XVI 2009, para 4). While it has become increasingly commonplace for theologians within the Roman Catholic tradition to focus extensively on the nature and aims of liberal arts education (and education more broadly), Caldecott has offered the most substantive and extensive, theological writings on the specific links between Eucharistic theology and pedagogy. His writings on education can therefore serve as an invaluable resource for theologians and educators who want to find an integrative model for liberal arts education—specifically, an integrative model that accounts for mutually donative (as opposed to mutually exclusive) relationships between the intellectual life and the sacramental life (which is the heart of the spiritual life within the Roman Catholic faith tradition). As importantly, his work responds to the need for such a renewal of intellectual and spiritual integration in the life of the Church and in its interactions with institutions of learning that subscribe to other value systems or faith traditions. Caldecott’s timely reflections and discussions on the relationship between faith and reason, between life and liturgy, show that wholistic education, within the Roman Catholic tradition, is focused on the art of living—on how to be, not just do (Beauty in the Word, Caldecott 2012, p. 11). More than just illustrate and examine the history of these relationships, his writings also provide theoretical, contemplative, and practical resources for the development of educational models which cultivate “the human capacity for metaphysical enquiry” (Fides et Ratio, Paul 1998, para. 22).