Interestingly, Augustine of Hippo, the great medieval theologian, observed that the lives we live and the things we love are inextricably linked. What we love impacts if, and how, we embody the virtues. In this way, seeking to live a virtuous life is both a moral enterprise and an affective one.

In fact, Augustine defines virtue in one of his writings as the possession of rightly ordered loves. If Augustine is correct, then our classical classrooms are incubators for not only the intellect and conscience, but the heart. Or to put it better, the classroom can be a place where the intellect, conscience, will, heart, and even body can grow into an integrated whole.

In this article, I will examine one key passage in Augustine’s City of God to examine closer his notion that virtue can be understood as rightly ordered loves. Then I will offer some practical takeaways for classical educators today.

Origins of the City

In The City of God Against the Pagans, or The City of God for short, Augustine offers a defense against pagan accusations that the fall of Rome is the poor result of the empire’s conversion to Christianity. This magnificent work, earning its place in the western canon of Great Books, is composed of twenty-two books, the first ten of which critique paganism while the final twelve tell the story of the City of God vis a vis the earthly city.

Augustine begins his account of the City of God with creation and, soon after, the fall. Following a fascinating discussion on angels, he examines the sinfulness of humanity and how death is the consequence for Adam’s sin. Augustine’s writing here will serve as the groundwork for the doctrine of original sin, the idea that all humans are born with a fallen nature.

A Proper Response to Reality

It is within this context that Augustine discusses beauty, the good, and the idea of properly ordered loves. In his explication of the early chapters of Genesis, specifically the Nephilim episode, Augustine writes, “For bodily beauty is indeed created by God; but it is a temporal and carnal, and therefore, a lower, good; and if it is loved more than God is…that love is as wrong as the miser’s when he forsakes justice out of his love for gold” (Book 15, Section 22).

In this quotation, Augustine introduces the idea that within objective Goodness, there are various types of individual goods, each of which fall upon a plane of gradation. In other words, gradations of goodness and beauty are hard-wired into reality. This reality generates particular moral obligations for human desire, namely, that we ought to love these goods in a way that is commensurate with their value.

Considering the example of a miserly obsession with gold, Augustine writes, “The fault here, though, lies not with the gold, but with the man; and this is true of every created thing: though it is good, it can be loved well or ill; well when the proper order is observed, and ill when that order is disturbed.”

Virtue as Properly Ordered Loves

Augustine goes on:

But if the Creator is truly loved – that is, if He Himself is loved, and not something else in place of Him – then He cannot be wrongly loved. We must, however, observe right order even in our love for the very love by which we love that which is worthy to be loved, so that there may be in us that virtue which enables us to live well. Hence, it seems to me that a brief and true definition of virtue is ‘rightly ordered love.’

City of God, XV.22

Augustine makes two important points here. First, he points out that in order to love God well, we must love Him most, more than anything else. To love God second, third, or behind any other good, is to mis-love Him. 

Second, after ordering love for God as uppermost amongst our loves, we must properly order our subsequent loves. This affective work, we might call it, will serve as the foundation from which virtues can emerge. If Augustine is correct, then one cannot be truly courageous or just or exhibit any other virtues, without some general proper ordering of loves in place.

Takeaways for the Classical Classroom

Augustine’s words are both helpful and convicting for the classical classroom. We talk often about the pursuit of wisdom and the cultivation of virtue. Here at Education Renaissance, we have written extensively about the role of habit training in the project of moral formation and helping our students grow in virtue. If we can help our students rightly order their loves, I believe we will only grow stronger in these endeavors.

One way we can do this is by weaving questions of love and desire into class discussion. What do the different characters in the literature text we are reading love most? Are any of these desires mis-ordered? How have these mis-ordered desires contributed to the problems the characters face?

We can also take the opportunity outside of class to speak into the lives of our students, asking them questions to help them take inventory of their own loves. This should start with affirmation: “I have noticed that you do really well in x. Tell me more about that. Why do you love it so much?” Through these kinds of conversation starters, we can get to the heart and help students begin to monitor and tailor their loves appropriately.

As teachers seek to build class culture and rightly order loves in their classrooms as a whole, here are some additional questions one might ask:

• Do students love learning for the pursuit of knowledge or for the grade that comes with it?
• Do students serve others out of love for neighbor or from a desire to be recognized?
• Do students pursue mastery of some sport, instrument, or other discipline out of a love for the goodness and beauty they create? Or is their motivation driven by modern notions of success?

For most of these questions, the answer is probably both, just as it is for many of us. The goal is not to expect perfection in this area instantaneously, but to consistently plant seeds over the longterm, challenging students to go deeper and consider how they are growing in virtue as people through the way in which their loves are ordered.

For, as the apostle Paul writes, “If I speak in the tongues of men and of angels, but have not love, I am a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal. And if I have prophetic powers, and understand all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have all faith, so as to remove mountains, but have not love, I am nothing” (1 Cor. 13:1-2 ESV).

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What does it mean to love God? How are we to love Him? What are we to love about Him? What parts of ourselves are we to employ in this endeavor? 

It has become popular in church circles today to emphasize loving God through the heart, the seat of our desires, affections, and emotions. Scholars such as James K.A. Smith promote recalibrating these desires through implementing intentionally formative habits, liturgies, and rituals. This whole-body approach to worship, Smith teaches, will form over time our desires to long for God’s kingdom above all else.

Smith is writing in response to what he believes has become a key error in the western church today: an overemphasis on human rationality. Smith does not deny that the human capacity to think, remember, and understand is essential to being human. But, Smith contends, it is not sufficient. Therefore, a full-orbed approach to discipleship and education will include the intentional formation of the heart, specifically through encountering beauty in communities through art, music, poetry, nature, and feasts.

In general, I agree with Smith and have interacted closely with his writing, such as here. A human is more than a brain on a stick. At the same time, it is important for Christians today to not swing to the other side of the pendulum and ignore human rationality altogether. In 1994, Mark Noll, who taught at Wheaton College before Notre Dame, famously wrote The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind. Spoiler alert: The scandal Noll refers to essentially is that, at the time of the publication of the book, there was not much of an evangelical mind. Conservative, Bible-believing Christians too often settled for tweet-length quips (before Twitter), proof texting, and feel-good theology as an alternative to quality research. 

Similarly, in 2018, Jonathan Haidt, an agnostic social psychologist at New York University, wrote The Coddling of the American Mind to raise the alarm that many Americans today have exchanged a rigorous pursuit of truth for group think and emotional reasoning. As a result, we have sidelined the mind from doing the intellectual work God intended it to, specifically the task of thinking through complex topics with lucidity and care.

In this second article in my ongoing series on the life of the mind, I want to dig deeper into Jesus’ command in the gospels to love God with the mind, alongside heart, soul, and strength. According to Jesus, one’s intellectual life is not spiritually neutral. What we think about, how we think, and our approach to learning itself all contain import for the way we know and love God. A key aspect of Christian discipleship, therefore, becomes cultivating the life of the mind for a vibrant love of God to grow. Let us now explore how this might be.

Jesus‘ Pursuit of Wisdom From the Past

One distinctive characteristic of the Christian classical education renewal movement is an enthusiasm for gleaning wisdom from the past. This knowledge of ancient wisdom provides students with a broader context for the history of ideas and helps them better discern truth from falsehood in their own day. 

To illustrate this insight, C.S. Lewis uses the metaphor of a clock. He writes, “If you join at eleven o’clock a conversation which began at eight you will often not see the real bearing of what is said…Every age has its own outlook. It is specially good at seeking certain truths and specially liable to make certain mistakes. We all, therefore, need the books that will correct the characteristic mistakes of our own period” (“Introduction” to On the Incarnation, p. 4). 

When we read the teachings of Jesus, we find that our Lord shared this deep appreciation for wisdom from the past. As a faithful Jew, Jesus was a faithful follower of the Old Testament Law, which he believed was wisdom revealed by God himself. In Luke 10:25-28, a legal expert approaches Jesus with the goal to put this knowledge of the Law to the test. With a striking blend of authority and compassion, Jesus showcases his commitment to the Law while counter-testing the legal expert with his own question.

The Shema with Two Additions

The legal expert’s test question is about how to inherit eternal life, the answer of which both he and Jesus agree is found in the Law. Quoting the Pentateuch, the expert recites to Jesus, “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength and with all your mind” (Deut. 6:5). Without pause, he continues “and [love] your neighbor as yourself” (Lev. 19:18).

It is important to note that the Deuteronomy passage is one of the most well-known in Jewish history and culture. It begins with the injunction, “Hear, O Israel,” which becomes the inspiration for the passage’s name, Shema (the word for “hear” in Hebrew is “Shema”). For faithful Jews, the Shema is handwritten on a small parchment and placed at shoulder height on the doorposts of observant Jewish homes (see Joel B. Green’s The Gospel of Luke of the New International Commentary series for further background on this passage). This practice is in accordance with Moses’ command in the passage to teach the words of the Law to Hebrew tradition throughout all facets of everyday life.

Interestingly, in Jesus’ conversation with the legal expert, there are two notable additions to the Shema. One is the neighbor-love command. The other is the inclusion of the mind to the list of ways humans are commanded to love God. (In the Shema, Moses lists heart, soul, and might, but not mind because the heart in Hebrew anthropology includes one’s rationality.) While both additions are worth exploring, in this article, I will focus only on the second, the addition of the mind as a pathway for loving God.

Love’s Four-Fold Structure

In his new book The Life We’re Looking For (Penguin Random House, 2022), author Andy Crouch references the Shema to offer a biblically-informed summary of what being fully human involves: “Every human person is a heart-soul-mind-strength complex designed for love” (33). 

Crouch distills these four categories as follows:

• Heart: the seat of desire and emotion
• Soul: the depth of self that is distinctive to each person

• Mind: the capacity and inclination to better understand our experience of God and this world

• Strength: the ability to work and play with all our being 

Together, this four-fold structure of what it means to be human finds its underlying goal to love, first and foremost, God, and also our neighbor. Crouch writes, “Most of all, we are designed for love–primed before we were born to seek out others, wired neurologically to respond with empathy and recognition, coming most alive when we are in relationships of mutual dependence and trust. Love calls out the best in us–it awakens our hearts, it stirs up the depths of our souls, it focuses our minds, it arouses our bodies to action and passion (35). 

A Loving Mind

The question, then, is how do we love God with our minds? What does a loving mind look? How do we hold together the deep affections of the heart with the activities of the mind? I will continue this inquiry in my next article, but for now, I will leave readers with three potential categories for how we might answer the question.

What we think about

Paul writes in Philippians 4:8 that Christians are to think about “…whatever is true, whatever is honorable, whatever is just, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is commendable, if there is any excellence, if there is anything worthy of praise.” It seems to me that one way we love God is by filtering the attention and content of our minds on what is good, true, and beautiful, all of which comes from God Himself.

How we think

While the mind is often connoted with cold rationality, I want to suggest that there is an artistry to mental activity that can be warm, elegant, and connective. When humans learn to think wisely according to the broader vision of wisdom as described in the Book of Proverbs, they flourish in a way that aligns with how God created the world. Proverbs 8 provides clues, specifically, for how the pursuit of wisdom connects to loving God with our minds.

Our approach to learning

In modern society, learning has been stripped of its relational qualities in service of utilitarian ends. Knowledge is power, or at least, the avenue for getting into college. But what if the pursuit of knowledge is meant to be primarily a relational enterprise? We form relationships with whom and that which we know. We can love God with our minds when we seek knowledge about Him that our love for Him may abound.

Join the Conversation

These are preliminary ideas that I will pick up in my next article. For now, I would be curious to hear what you think. How can we love God with our minds? Please comment below and join me in this exploration.

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Broadly speaking, I like how Waitzkin frames the book from the vantage point of the learner. As educators, we can become immersed in the headspace of the teacher as we work on our craft. This in itself is a good thing, since there’s much to practice and hone as teachers. But Waitzkin’s book provides a helpful reminder that the work of the student learning is our primary goal. He gives ample insight into his own learning, first as a chess player (he was the subject of the book and subsequent movie Searching for Bobby Fischer), then as a martial artist, becoming a world champion in Tai Chi. While Waitzkin is a top performer in multiple (and disparate) fields, the book focuses more on the process of learning, only incidentally referring to his accomplishments. As we’ll see below, process is way more important that results.

Jason has written extensively on the concept of flow.

(See The Flow of Thought series: Part 1: Training the Attention for Happiness’ Sake; Part 2: The Joy of Memory; Part 3: Narration as Flow; Part 4: The Seven Liberal Arts as Mental Games; Part 5: The Play of Words; Part 6: Becoming Amateur Historians; Part 7: Rediscovering Science as the Love of Wisdom.)

This is a major concept that weaves through Waitzkin’s book. While some readers might not take on board some of his examples from Eastern mysticism, much of what he writes about illustrates and exemplifies how important flow is to top performance as a learner. (For what it’s worth, and perhaps this can be a future article, for almost every point at which Waitzkin draws upon Eastern ideas, I was able to think of a biblical passage that effectively communicated the same concept. For instance, Waitzkin beautifully describes the child-like nature of learning [p. 80], which reminded me of Matthew 18:3 “unless you turn and become like children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven.”)

This book is a great read, and I encourage you to read it thoroughly for yourself. Here I will unpack four principles that are central to Waitzkin’s understanding of the art of learning. If you’ve been following Educational Renaissance for some time, you will hear many resonances with articles we’ve written elsewhere. The four principles are growth mindset, deliberate practice, discipline AND love, and routines.

The Art of Learning Principle 1: Fixed vs. Growth Mindset

Carol Dweck is best known for her book Mindset. So it was interesting to see Waitzkin draw upon her work to describe a key aspect of his own learning (Art of Learning, pp. 30-33). Dweck argues that individuals can be placed on a spectrum of views pertaining to their own intelligence. Those adopting a fixed (or entity) mindset view their intelligence as an innate quality. For instance, the student who thinks, “Well, I’m not good at math,” has adopted the fixed mindset. The liability is that the individual perceives herself as something that will be perpetuated into the future, which short-circuits growth. Contrast this with the growth (or incremental) mindset in which the individual takes on the view of self as in a state of development. It’s important to note that these mindsets aren’t adopted consciously, and an individual needs to be observed to determine where they fall on this fixed vs. growth spectrum. The reflective learner, though, once their mindset has been identified, can modulate towards the growth mindset.

Waitzkin draws out an important point from Dweck’s work, which is the learner’s response to failure. He writes:

Children who associate success with hard work tend to have a “mastery-oriented response” to challenging situations, while children who see themselves as just plain “smart” or “dumb,” or “good” or “bad” at something, have a “learned helplessness orientation.”

Art of Learning, p. 30

What Waitzkin is talking about is how fixed-mindset students want to avoid failure because it is received as a definition of their innate ability, whereas the growth-mindset student invests in failure because it reveals an area for growth–a place where the student is not at the level they want to be at yet. The “mastery-oriented response” means that the student sees initial failure as a challenge to work hard toward mastery.

At a later point, Waitzkin develops the idea of “investment in loss” that expands upon the growth mindset (pp. 107-113). It can be difficult to take on a growth mindset in part because it hurts when our pride gets bruised due to failure. We want to resist the learning process, finding it easier to adopt a fixed mindset and assume that’s just the way it is. He writes,

“In order to grow, he needs to give up his current mind-set. He needs to lose to win.” (p. 107)

Giving yourself to the learning process means that the learner must actually embrace loss and failure. Failure leads to humility as our pride is chipped away. Failure also leads to growth, step by step. Adopting the growth mindset means accepting the long journey to maximizing one’s ability in any given field. Yet more often than not, we are operating at suboptimal levels. That’s just the nature of life. As Waitzkin states,

“It is essential to have a liberating incremental approach that allows for times when you are not in a peak performance state.” (p. 113)

In other words, the growth mindset can simultaneously recognize that one is not working at the top level and still invest in the opportunity for growth.

A corollary to the fixed vs. growth mindset is the result vs. process approach. Waitzkin, who is a top performer in multiple fields, believes that results are harder to come by when you are results oriented. Instead, we should focus on setting up a “process-first approach” (pp. 44-47). I’ve heard other performance experts talk about setting systems rather than setting goals for long-term success. What I appreciate about Waitzkin is that he balances both result and process approaches. He writes,

“While a fixation on results is certainly unhealthy, short-term goals can be useful developmental tools if they are balanced within a nurturing long-term philosophy.” (p. 44)

So as teachers, we can set small benchmarks to track progress, but these benchmarks should not detract from the sense that we are establishing a process or system.

The Art of Learning Principle 2: Deliberate Practice

Anders Ericsson is a pioneer in high performance research and is perhaps the first to express the idea that the key to expert performance rests not in innate qualities but in extended periods of deliberate practice. He writes in an article published in Psychological Review,

“We argue that the differences between expert performers and normal adults reflect a life-long period of deliberate effort to improve performance in a specific domain.” (1993, Vol. 100. No. 3, pg. 400)

Deliberate practice has obvious connections to the growth mindset, so it’s not surprising to find Waitzkin incorporating concepts of deliberate practice.

Learning effectively takes time. As Waitzkin describes sessions of deep absorption in the world of chess, he provides us with an image of the kind of learning students need to take on board in order to become really effective in any domain.

“Sometimes the study would take six hours in one sitting, sometimes thirty hours over a week. I felt like I was living, breathing, sleeping in that maze, and then, as if from nowhere, all the complications dissolved and I understood.” (Art of Learning, pg. 74)

The satisfaction and joy of understanding is a profound experience, but it only comes after time spent in deep work. Waitzkin expresses the concept of deliberate practice as “numbers to leave numbers.” When we are confronted with highly technical information, it needs to be assimilated in such a way that it becomes integrated into our intuition. A concert pianist doesn’t think about scales and arpeggios while performing on stage. This would detract from her expression. What we can assume when watching a virtuosic performance is that hours upon hours have been spent internalizing scale patterns so that the finger patters are simply part of her being. There is no thought of scales or of fingerings, simply of music. She has studied scales to leave scales, which is what Waitzkin is expressing here.

As teachers it can be difficult to help students catch the bug of deliberate practice, especially when our goal is not necessarily expert performance in one domain, but merely steady progress in multiple simultaneous domains. Our students are predisposed to be highly motivated in some subjects and less than motivated in others. The joy of understanding feels too remote and hours of deep absorption is the last thing they want to be assigned. Good coaching is one aspect (and we will delve into this below shortly). Another concept that will guide us is reduced complexity.

Waitzkin uses the concept of “smaller circles” to get at this essential idea:

“Over time expansiveness decreases while potency increases. I call this method ‘Making Smaller Circles.’” (p. 120)

Perhaps we can be forgiven of thinking of Mr. Miyagi training Daniel LaRusso with his “wax on, wax off” techniques. Mr. Miyagi was using “smaller circles” by breaking down karate moves to its component parts that were learnable through garden-variety exercises. The vast expanse of knowledge in mathematics, history, literature and science require deliberate practice in order to gain competence, let alone expertise. Such a task is way too overwhelming for a teacher, let alone so many students with different dispositions. Yet, breaking down the complexity into small steps provides a way to train students in deliberate practice. Additionally, some of the complexity occurs because we try to move quickly through content. Some skills, though, are built best when practiced slowly.

“We have to be able to do something slowly before we can have any hope of doing it correctly with speed.” (pg. 120)

As an example, for our students who will be taking AP tests in May, I have them practice a few problems slowly and deliberately early in the training process. This builds certain skills they will need with regard to understanding the nature of multiple choice questions, how to eliminate incorrect answer, how to avoid trick questions, etc. Later they can operate at a more rapid speed because we’ve taken the time to thoroughly comb over a few example questions multiple times. (For what it’s worth, I have mixed feelings about the whole AP enterprise. Forgive me for viewing the College Board as the Galactic Empire.)

A seemingly contradictory concept is “chunking” or “the ability to assimilate large amounts of information into a cluster that is bound together by certain information into a cluster that is bound together by certain patterns or principles particular to a given discipline” (pg. 138). Yes, we want to break massive complexes of information and skills down to small steps absorbed slowly, but we can also recognize that the mind works like a supernetwork to systematize all it knows into meaningful relationships. By letting new information bump up against other closely related information, the brain can absorb it more easily than if it is completely disconnected from everything else.

As educators, we can help our students capitalize on their natural interest in specific domains by connecting other areas of knowledge to those domains. Modern education fractures domains of knowledge into separate arenas. It is no surprise then that students become fractured beings, thinking of themselves as math people or art people. Therefore, we need to provide students a means of putting their being back together again, a unifying theory of reality and existence occurs when we understand all learning as interrelated.

The Art of Learning Principle 3: Discipline AND Love

Waitzkin describes many of his different chess teachers. Some challenged him to become more disciplined while others wanted him to express his natural game. There’s a balance between discipline and love that needs to be considered carefully. In describing his first teacher, Bruce, Waitzkin writes,

“He had to teach me to be more disciplined without dampening my love for chess or suppressing my natural voice. Many teachers have no feel for this balance and try to force their students into cookie-cutter molds.” (p. 9)

This is one of the great tensions all teachers face. We have a tendency to slip to one extreme or the other according to our personalities and propensities (especially when we ourselves are stressed). We need order and we need warmth in the learning environment.

I think the imagery Waitzkin provides by way of his mother beautifully describes the way we as teachers can build an alliance with students. He explains two ways of taming a wild horse. One way is to break it:

“The horse goes through pain, rage, frustration, exhaustion, to near death… then it finally yields.” (p. 86)

This dominance approach can be highly effective, but our response is that something damaging happened to that horse. It lost something of its nature by being broken. An approach defined by extreme discipline lacks love of the beautiful creature being trained.

Waitzkin’s mother, on the other hand, is a “horse whisperer.” The trainer creates an alliance with the horse by petting it, grooming it, stroking it.

“So you guide the horse toward doing what you want to do because he wants to do it.” (p. 87)

Notice that the horse whisperer hasn’t give up all discipline, but the discipline comes through love. Training students takes the same kind of indirect approach of leadership rather than manipulation. If students are going to operate at their best, the can be broken, submitting to the rigors of the system, or they can be groomed to desire for themselves their personal best. When we are growth minded and process oriented as teachers, we can help our students gain for themselves a growth mindset and process approach.

The Art of Learning Principle 4: Routines

The last concept I want to draw out from Waitzkin’s book is the concept of routines. Effective learning occurs when we have established healthy patterns. Imagine what a school day would look like if every student ate right, got to bed on time and ordered their books nicely each day. Waitzkin describes his involvement with the Human Performance Institute in Orlando. We associate the Institute with high caliber performers like Michael Jordan and Tiger Woods, so it is striking that they brought in a chess player to study high performance beyond athletics. One of the key concepts gleaned from his experience is the importance of routines.

High performers often incorporate routines as a means to maximize their effectiveness. We often hear of inspiring stories of top athletes who get to practice before their teammates to put in that many more reps that later pay off on the field. These athletes created a routine; the routine of getting to practice early. Effective routines enable top performers to get into the right frame of mind, especially when they have to operate under pressure. As a Chicagoan growing up in the Jordan era, I recalled that Michael Jordan would regularly ask for the ball in clutch situations. He wanted the ball when the game was on the line. He had a winning frame of mind that was cultivated through routines.

Students can create routines that help them to function at their best as learners. Waitzkin advises working backward from the desired state to identify a “trigger” that initiates a four- or five-step routine (p. 188). For example, a student experiences anxiety whenever a test is handed out. She wants to calm herself so that her anxiety doesn’t adversely impact her test. Working backwards from her desired state (calm), she decides that she will take a deep breath, after stretching her arms, after sharpening her pencil, after getting a drink of water. The trigger for this four-step routine is the transition to test time. By laying out this routine, she is taking control of her emotional state with the goal of being in the right frame of mind to do her best on the test.

What Waitzkin is describing here is very similar to what Charlotte Mason teaches about habit training. We gain a vision of some inspiring idea that we would like to attain (for example, focused attention). We delineate a few key steps to the habit. And then we practice that until it is internalized. This is obviously an overly simplified description of Mason’s philosophy, but as teachers one of our primary tools is habit training. We can lovingly enable our students to acquire the discipline to live masterful lives through our support.

Speaking of habit training, a couple weeks ago I finished writing my eBook on habit training! It should be coming out in the next few weeks. So stay tuned. There you will find a much fuller treatment of habit training from a Charlotte Mason perspective.

In the comments let us know how you are applying these concepts (growth mindset, deliberate practice, discipline AND love, and routines) in your work as an educator!

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