In a 2017 lecture for the Lumen Christi Institute, Jared Ortiz, a professor of theology and the director of the St. Benedict Institute at Hope College in Holland, MI, put forward a provocative claim: the liturgy fulfills the promise of the liberal arts. Slightly restated, a great books education is completed and integrated by the corporate prayer of the Church in the Mass and the Divine Office. Dr. Ortiz recounted his own experience as a student at the University of Chicago, where “the life of the mind” was sometimes pursued in a compartmentalized way: “The Mass [on the other hand] addressed my whole person in all its dimensions: intellectual, spiritual, affective, moral, physical, aesthetic, temporal, immortal, and so on…. The experience of Mass provided a sympathetic knowledge of the true, good, and beautiful by allowing me to enter into and dwell within these realities. The Mass is a place where I experienced all things holding together.”¹ The liturgy combined the sensual and intelligible into a unified vision of reality. What could have been separated into discrete sciences and disciplines was united and oriented toward praise of the divine.

The integrative power of the liturgy derives in no small part from the fact that the liturgy instantiates a particular method or habit of reading. The liturgy performs what Alasdair MacIntyre has called “the Augustinian conception”² of inquiry: for certain texts to be read well, they must not only be interpreted by the reader; the reader must allow the text to interpret him. A reader must not only ask questions of the text, but have questions asked of him in turn.

The habit of placing oneself at the foot of a text predates the establishment of the liturgy. The ancient study of the Greek and Latin classics through the liberal arts of the Trivium (grammar, logic, and rhetoric) encouraged patient, careful, and repeated reading. But in the medieval monasteries the liberal arts, the Church Fathers, and Scripture came together to produce a new and characteristically Christian humanism. In the monasteries this Augustinian mode of reading is fully developed, and the liturgy is established as the perfected representation thereof. In the liturgical practices of the monastery, the monks were constantly reminded that there are certain texts—especially, but not only, Sacred Scripture—which must not only be read carefully, but must be allowed, in their turn, to read the reader back to himself.³ These texts must be chewed on, re-read, meditated upon, until they are ultimately inscribed on one’s heart. Scripture, treated in this way, provided a kind of grammar in which the monk’s own life became legible.

This Augustinian mode of reading can easily be forgotten in a university committed to scientific method and the advance of knowledge. Even Great Books programs are liable to miss it. But it has not gone entirely unappreciated. St. John Henry Newman conceptualized a “collegiate principle” to counterbalance the tendencies of the “university principle,” and he made the college the home of both the liberal arts and the liturgy. Nor should it be a surprise that in institutes and academic departments shaped by participation in the liturgy, this Augustinian mode is often appreciated and preserved today.

University vs. College

In 1856, St. John Henry Newman took stock of a university situation not dissimilar to Dr. Ortiz’s and gestured toward a resolution when he elaborated on the balance and complementarity of a true education. A proper education ought to integrate both the “university principle” and the “collegiate principle.” The university was the site for the advancement of knowledge, the systematic study of the disciplines, and the sciences, generally. The college was home to another kind of learning: it was for the formation of intellectual and moral character, the study of literature and the classics, and the home of religious discipline and devotion—that is, the home of the liturgy.⁴

Both the college and the university were sites of learning—but learning in different modes. The collegiate mode Newman would analogize to the poetry of Benedictine monasticism, as contrasted with the scientific inquiry of the Dominican scholastic. Benedictine poetic collegiate learning was intensely personal: it occurred among others with whom one lived; it raised personal and existential questions; it was perennial rather than new. The college was home for both the liberal arts and corporate prayer.⁵

Christopher Dawson, the great English historian, has described the historical development of Newman’s Benedictine collegiate principle. A tradition of liberal learning was handed down intact “from the Greek sophists to the Latin rhetoricians and grammarians and from these to the monks and clerks of the Middle Ages.”⁶ The original liberal education of the Greeks and Romans was rooted in a study of grammar, logic, and rhetoric (the Trivium) in order to form a just estimation of words, the laws of thought, and rules of logic. One learned by studying the most excellent examples—so the Trivium was inextricably a patient and careful study of literature.

In the Latin West, the study of grammar and the Latin classics predominated. When the Roman Empire converted to Christianity, a new Christian humanism sprung from twin roots: it grew from Latin grammar and the Latin classics, but also the Latin Fathers, the Bible, and the liturgy. When the Roman Empire fell, and Christian monks discovered the task of re-educating barbarian peoples, they brought the liberal arts with them.⁷ The Bible was a text, and to read it well one needed to know the rules of language and composition. As Jean Leclercq has pointed out, when Charlemagne began his reforms of the liturgy and monastic life in 780, what resulted was a literary renaissance. A reformed liturgy combated superstition, and precise Latin grammar protected the doctrinal formulations of the Church. To know Latin required a study of the Latin classics and the liberal arts. The ensuing literary renaissance took place within monasteries and produced a distinctive monastic style.⁸

Read Great Texts as a Monk

Jean Leclercq has described how the monastic style can be distinguished from the later-developing scholastic style. In the scholastic style, the text is treated in impersonal terms.⁹ The text is investigated by making clear and repeated distinctions. Problems arise and are addressed in succession; questions are posed to the text and the solutions of previous commentators are presented and evaluated. The text has little that is personal—which is its great value as an object for scientific investigation.¹⁰

On the other hand, the monastic style is intensely personal.¹¹ The investigation into a text presumes a personal discourse: a man, speaking in the first person, directly addresses his audience. The teacher presumes a special way of life or a “commitment” from his audience. Not speculative insight, but “savoring and clinging to the truth” is its object. Very personal desires—the love of learning and desire for God—animate this style of study.¹²

The monastic mode of divine reading (lectio divina) was an active reading in which all the senses were employed. Different from reading today, which is silent and solitary, the monks read aloud and in community. They read with the eyes, the lips, the ears. They read aloud to fix the text in their memory. “To speak, to think, to remember, are the three necessary phases of the same activity.” Monastic reading required “the participation of the whole body and the whole mind.”¹³

This mode of reading naturally led the monk to the ancient and medieval practice of meditatio or meditation, in which the text was inscribed on the body and soul of the reader.¹⁴ For the monks, one did not meditate “in the abstract” or on invisible ideas—meditatio was not Descartes’s practice of radical doubt in “Meditations on First Philosophy.” Rather, one meditated on a text, which meant to read it “and to learn it ‘by heart’ in the fullest sense of the expression, that is, with one’s whole being: with the body, since the mouth pronounced it, with the memory which fixes it, with the intelligence which understands its meaning, and with the will which desires to put it into practice.”¹⁵

For the monks of the Middle Ages, the liturgy was “both the stimulus and the outcome” of monastic culture.¹⁶ The liturgy formed the monks through their daily participation within it. In being taught how to see themselves within the texts of Scripture, the monks learned how to turn their knowledge and love of secular literature toward the ends Scripture directed. When the monks composed the hymns, poems, and canticles which ornamented the liturgy, they understood the liturgy to be “the synthesis of all the arts…of the literary techniques, religious reflection,” and of the classical and patristic sources. They combined their learning and devotion into an homage to God.¹⁷

This monastic Christian humanism developed in the Middle Ages into a love of learning and desire for God that perfected a particular mode of reading texts. With Sacred Scripture as both the ground and perfection of this mode, the collegiate monastic humanism educated a student not only in how to read texts, but how to allow texts to read the student. Certain texts could only be read well if one not only posed questions to the text, but allowed the text to pose questions back—if one discovered “in and through his or her reading of those texts, that they in turn interpret the reader.”¹⁸ This mode of reading great texts found its origin in the liberal arts of the Trivium and thus preceded the liturgy, but the liturgy gave the perfected and completed instance thereof.

Exemplars: Augustine and Dante

Texts of artful composition that necessitate repeated reading predate the composition of the New Testament and establishment of the liturgy. Platonic dialogues like the Meno and the Republic come immediately to mind, where the dramatic action of the dialogue and the repeated reformulation of key theses require a slow study. And the philosophical schools of the ancient pagan world required their disciples to memorize and recite the docta of their philosophical masters.¹⁹ But just as the “seeds of the Word” were scattered among all peoples, waiting to find their unity in Christ,²⁰ so too were the elements of patient and careful reading brought to their proper end within the communal living and learning of the medieval Benedictine monasteries.

St. Augustine formally inaugurated the development of this collegiate or monastic mode. His insights about divine illumination and reminiscence provided the theological and philosophical grounds for the monks of the Middle Ages to experience the revelatory work of Scripture and the Fathers. He also provided the paradigmatic example of a text reading a man to himself in his Confessions. The Confessions gives meaning to Augustine’s own life by placing it within the sweep of salvation history—in the first two pages of the Confessions, the only words adequate to explain God’s call and Augustine’s conversion are the words of the Psalms and the Gospels. Moreover, Augustine’s conversion took place through the reading of Scripture, as he is told to tolle lege (“take and read”) the letter of St. Paul lying before him. The text revealed Augustine to himself. In other words, the Roman orator, who so greatly prided himself on skillful composition and analysis, is himself analyzed and composed by the Word of God. Scripture provided the grammar by which Augustine was able to read his own life.

If Augustine is the source of this tradition, Dante is its perfected example. Dante stands as the great unification of the scholastic and monastic mode, or the Dominican and Benedictine, or the university and the college. His Divine Comedy presents a world in which its very geography is shaped by Aristotelian moral philosophy, Thomistic theology, ancient scientific astronomy, and the Latin classics. The great Latin poet Virgil leads Dante through a world governed by Thomas’s scholastic synthesis, before Virgil cedes his duties as guide to Beatrice—Dante’s great love—and Bernard of Clairvaux, the Cistercian monk. Most important, all is held together within a narrative fundamentally liturgical and scriptural: Dante enters Hell on Good Friday, escapes from Hell on Easter Sunday, and throughout at the opportune moments appear the canticles and psalms of the liturgy. Just as with Augustine, Dante can only understand the predicament that visits him “in a dark wood” by explaining his own life within the conceptual apparatus of Scripture and the liturgy.

Legacy, Eclipse—and Return

This Augustinian mode of reading is slow, deliberative, meditative: it is the mastication of a great text,²¹ in which it becomes a part of the reader, poses questions to the reader, and ultimately explains the reader to himself. It can obviously exist outside of the liturgy. But for the medieval monks, the liturgy served both as the ground and perfection of study. It shaped the monks and offered the perfected example for comparison. It complemented the scholastic mode of reading: the Christian humanism of the Benedictines could combine with Dominican rationalism to form a truly liberal education.

Christopher Dawson has explained the transition whereby humanism lost its specifically Christian character and the scholastic scientific project was transformed into a technological and methodological pursuit of mastery over nature: “for more than two centuries [across the 18th and 19th centuries] western civilization has been losing contact with the religious traditions on which it was originally founded and devoting all its energies to the conquest and organization of the world by economic and scientific techniques.”²² For all their efficacy and fruitfulness, the new scientific methods—especially in their application to social affairs—could hardly cognize the lectio divina or the meditatio. In the 1920s, from a sense that something had been lost in this newfound emphasis on progress, utility, and socialization, Great Books programs were inaugurated at Columbia and the University of Chicago.

A deep insight animated these Great Books programs: true education demanded more than narrow scientific competency. To be initiated into “the great conversation about great ideas,”²³ one had to go back to the old texts of the tradition. But in a desire to capture the breadth of the Great Conversation, an enormous range of texts was presented for reading (the original Great Books of the Western World was published in 54 volumes). One risked confusing quantity of reading with depth of reading.

Whenever compromises had to be made, the period most often cut was the very Middle Ages described above. The original 54-volume Great Books devoted only five volumes to the period between the fourth and 14th centuries AD—Augustine, Aquinas (two volumes), Dante, and Chaucer. The medieval Augustinian monastic mode little resembled “innovative” modern philosophy and was thus excluded. By cutting this period and by reading widely (and necessarily quickly), the new Great Books tradition could easily lose sight of the slow mastication of a text. Even close reading, when divorced from monastic and liturgical insights, could quickly devolve into a method for discovering the esoteric or “hidden” messages of a great text which, for all its apparent similarity, could not be further from placing oneself at the foot of a text to inscribe it onto one’s heart.

It should not be surprising that the places where this Augustinian mode of reading is emphasized—where texts are read together, slowly, in a community, animated by personal loves (that is, the love of learning and desire for God)—are institutions and departments themselves shaped by their members’ participation in the liturgy. One can see this in the short-lived but renowned Integrated Humanities program at the University of Kansas; the Catholic Studies departments encouraged by the writings of Don Briel and the Program of Liberal Studies at Notre Dame; at the University of Tulsa’s honors college when it was led by Jennifer Frey; at Catholic Studies Institutes like Collegium at the University of Pennsylvania, St. Benedict Institute at Hope College, and my home at the Lumen Christi Institute at the University of Chicago, which has emphasized the formation of communities of intellectual and spiritual friendship.²⁴

None of these institutes or departments teach students to read other great texts as if they were the liturgy. But in being formed by the liturgy, the leadership of these institutes is keenly aware of the humanistic need to “read again,” to patiently open oneself to a text. One goal of these departments and institutes is to remind students of the various ways in which texts can be read, so that students are prepared when they find themselves in the middle of a dark wood; or for that day in which they are told to tolle lege and discover, suddenly, that it is the text that is reading them.

1. Lumen Christi Institute. (2025, August 11). All Things Hold Together: A Great Books Education and the Catholic Tradition:
   https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QlVYpA4tcaU&ab_channel=LumenChristiInstitute
2. Alasdair MacIntyre, Three Rival Versions of Moral Enquiry (South Bend: Notre Dame Press, 1990), 82–104.
3. The liturgy, as the perfected corporate reading and re-reading of the Word of God, “reveals man to himself and brings to light his most high calling,” to use the words of the Second Vatican Council on the activity of Jesus Christ (Gaudium et Spes, 22).
4. John Henry Newman, “Rise and Progress of Universities,” in Historical Sketches, Vol III (London: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1909), 228–230. For Newman’s understanding of the liturgy, see in the Adoremus Bulletin “‘The Most Joyful and Blessed Ordinance of the Gospel’: Saint John Henry Newman on the Liturgy” (Nov. 9, 2019) and “The Heart of John Henry Newman: Beating with the Spirit of the Liturgy” (Nov. 11, 2020). In 1991, a collection of Newman’s sermons on the liturgy was published as Sermons, 1824–1843. Vol. 1: Sermons on the Liturgy and Sacraments and on Christ the Mediator, ed. Placid Murray (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991). Within that volume, he preaches that the liturgy “impresses upon our hearts the true image of the Christian character” (71). Compare infra the power of the Augustinian mode to inscribe a text on a reader’s heart.
5. On the poetic Benedictines and scientific Dominicans, see John Henry Newman, “The Mission of St. Benedict,” in Historical Sketches, Vol II (London: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1906). For a fuller account of Newman’s vision of the college, see Paul Shrimpton’s The ‘Making of Men.’ The Idea and Reality of Newman’s University in Oxford and Dublin (Herefordshire: Gracewing, 2014), which gathers Newman’s letters, diaries, and written plans for his Dublin university. The college was the home of “personal influence.” For an account of personal influence and the influence of Scripture, see Oxford University Sermon V, “Personal Influence, the Means of Propagating the Truth,” in Fifteen Sermons Preached Before the University of Oxford (South Bend: University of Notre Dame Press, 1997), 75–98.
6. Christopher Dawson, The Crisis of Western Education (Washington D.C.: Catholic University of America Press, 2010), 5.
7. Dawson, The Crisis of Western Education, 6–9.
8. Jean Leclercq, O.S.B, The Love of Learning and the Desire for God (New York: Fordham University Press, 1982), 38–41.
9. Leclercq cites as an instance Peter Lombard’s prologue to his Commentary on the Epistles of St. Paul.
10. Jean Leclercq, The Love of Learning and the Desire for God, 3–4.
11. Leclercq cites Bernard of Clairvaux’s prologue to his Sermons on the Canticle of Canticles. Both the scholastic and monastic modes are commentaries on scripture—it is not the subject matter but the style that distinguishes the two.
12. Jean Leclercq, The Love of Learning and the Desire for God, 4.
13. Leclercq, The Love of Learning, 16.
14. Leclercq, The Love of Learning, 73.
15. Leclercq, The Love of Learning, 17.
16. Leclercq, The Love of Learning, 236.
17. Leclercq, The Love of Learning, 250–251.
18. MacIntyre, Three Rival Versions of Moral Enquiry, 82.
19. Pierre Hadot, Philosophy as a Way of Life: Spiritual Exercises from Socrates to Foucault (New York: Wiley-Blackwell, 1995).
20. References to the doctrine of spermatikoi logoi, or seeds of the Word, begin in the writings of the second-century Justin Martyr and can be found in the writings of many of the Church Fathers. Newman offers a helpful summary of the doctrine in his review of Millman’s Essence of Christianity (Essays Historical and Critical, Vol. II [London: Longman’s], 230–232.): “Now, the phenomenon, admitted on all hands, is this:—that great portion of what is generally received as Christian truth, is in its rudiments or in its separate parts to be found in heathen philosophies and religions…. Mr. Milman argues from it,—‘These things are in heathenism, therefore they are not Christian:’ we, on the contrary, prefer to say, ‘these things are in Christianity, therefore they are not heathen.’ That is, we prefer to say, and we think that Scripture bears us out in saying, that from the beginning the Moral Governor of the world has scattered the seeds of truth far and wide over its extent; that these have variously taken root, and grown up as in the wilderness, wild plants indeed but living; … So far then from her creed being of doubtful credit because it resembles foreign theologies, we even hold that one special way in which Providence has imparted divine knowledge to us has been by enabling her to draw and collect it together out of the world, and, in this sense, as in others, to suck the milk of the Gentiles and to suck the breast of kings.”
21. J. Leclercq, The Love of Learning, 73.
22. Dawson, Crisis, 129.
23. This was the subtitle of the first volume, written by University of Chicago president Robert Maynard Hutchins, in the 54-volume Great Books of the Western World, published originally in 1952 by Encyclopedia Britannica.
24. This list only considers departments or para-academic organizations that address the needs of otherwise secular or secularized university campuses. Many worthy organizations are unjustly left unmentioned. Nor does this list include Catholic colleges formed along similar lines, like Wyoming Catholic College, Thomas Aquinas College, et al. Nor does this list include secular colleges that are sensitive to this Augustinian humanism without the explicit influence of the liturgy, like St. John’s College or Hillsdale College.