Today’s readings at Mass included the story of Naboth and Ahab from the Book of Kings. I wish to focus only on the beginning of this story:
“Naboth the Jezreelite had a vineyard in Jezreel next to the palace of Ahab, king of Samaria. Some time later, Ahab said to Naboth, “Give me your vineyard to be my vegetable garden, since it is close by, next to my house. I will give you a better vineyard in exchange, or, if you prefer, I will give you its value in money.” Naboth said to Ahab, “The Lord forbid that I should give you my ancestral heritage.”1
Now, as far as the literal sense of the text is concerned, this story has nothing to do with work in education. However, St. Thomas reminds us that “That signification whereby things signified by words have themselves also a signification, is called the spiritual sense.”2 So I wish to offer a spiritual signfication of this text (I do not presume to indicate that what follows here is the signification that Our Lord intended by this text, but, simply that my contemplation of this text led me to the following consideration).
Do Catholic educators respond as Naboth does to offers from the government (represented here by King Ahab) to trade our intellectual inheritance for another one, or, for a sum of money?
Producing Priceless Fruit
The vineyard of Naboth was producing grapes and wine – a valuable product. A vineyard, and the care and development of the vines that produce the grapes, requires multi-generational labor and management. By nature, a strong, healthy vineyard is an inheritance because the man who plants knows he is not the man who will harvest. Rather, the best wine will come from old vines, and those old vines will be older than any man who first plants them. His descendants will see the true fruit of the vineyard. Naboth knows this, and this is why he calls his vineyard his “ancestral heritage”. Naboth is not protecting a monetary asset. He is protecting the vines and the labor of his fathers, knowing that what is being produced on that property is more valuable than money. The vineyard is unsaleable not only because its produce is nearly invaluable, but because it does not really belong to him; it belongs to his fathers.
King Ahab desires to make the field where this vineyard sits a vegetable garden, since its location is convenient for his royal palace. We can understand the vegetable garden to represent the procurement of his household’s immediate dietary needs. While they might be vegetables and not burgers and fries, you might allow me to say that Ahab wants to buy the corner lot which is home to the family business and turn it into a fast food joint. He will rip out the generational vines (the thought makes any gardener viscerally sad) to make room for vegetables. He does not offer this without compensation of course. Ahab suggests a “better vineyard” or a sum of money.
Now, what does this have to do with Catholic education?
Is There A Better Vineyard?
Catholics have an ancestral inheritance when it comes to education. No one of our generation, nor of any recent generations, and certainly not any American generation, was among those who sowed the seed of this vine. Rather, its roots extend so deep into history that in truth what can really be called “Catholic” in education is a graft onto the Greek and Roman intellectual culture planted in the ancient world. The Classical Liberal Arts Academy provides many articles and resources to learn about the development of the classical liberal arts and the Scholastic enterprise of grafting the faith onto the vine of Aristotelian philosophy. We might be content in this article to simply indicate that what we receive as Catholics as our true ancestral heritage is greater than any one generation might produce and more valuable than any other so-called “better vineyard”; it is, to be sure, of inestimable value.
When the modern State’s pedagogical reformers approach Catholics and offer them a better vineyard or a sum of money in exchange for the use of our field – not to continue producing long tested, deeply rooted Catholic educational outcomes but for the State’s own immediate needs – what is our response?
The State, as is shown elsewhere, at the beginning of the Industrial Age, needed to make education fit its own more immediate needs and produce outcomes that would serve modern ends: well behaved, patriotic civilians ready to enter the workforce and participate intelligently in civil society. Inasmuch as Catholic education (again, we must think of Scholasticism, or Jesuit missionary schools when we use this term) dominated the educational field, focusing on such ends as wisdom, felicity, and union with God, the State needed this ground for its own work. It was not as interested in the wine of the old vines as it was the new vegetable gardens to keep its labor force well fed and civil.
What the State offers is another vineyard or a sum of money. “Another vineyard” is simply the offer to use the modern curriculum even as a “Catholic” institution by participating in the State’s work of producing a citizenry worthy of the Industrial, and now post-Industrial Ages. Catholics could follow the same models, the same curriculum, the same pedagogies, the same assessments, the same financial structures, to build their schools. It would not be your fathers’ vineyard of course, but who is drinking that wine these days anyway? The new fruit would be “better”.
Alternatively, and this is happening more and more today with the advent of “vouchers” and public charter schools, the State offers Catholics a simple exchange of money for the use of the field of education. Catholics will happily take this money from the State and then implement the same modern curriculum with a few “Catholic” adornments. The State is pleased with such an arrangement, since its purposes are still fulfilled and Catholic piety and devotion can be left, as it is in any other religion, to private activities.
What is our response to this offer by the King? Is it that of Naboth? “The Lord forbid that I should give you my ancestral heritage.” Or do we make the swap? I fear we’ve made the swap. Catholics may have made noble efforts to avoid doing so in the past, but as we see in the rest of the story from Scripture, letters from Jezebel have persuaded many leaders to remove Naboth and make the deal with the King.
A Proper Response
The Catholic intellectual heritage is offered in the Classical Liberal Arts Academy without compromise, and even, to be sure, while still fulfilling the minimum mandatory requirements set by “the King”. It is the one institution in the current Catholic educational turmoil that is responding as Naboth did to the State’s offer of a better vineyard or a sum of money: “The Lord forbid!”
- 1 Kgs 21:1–3 NABRE. This is the standard translation used for the weekday and Sunday Mass readings in the United States. ↩︎
- St. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae I, q. 1, a. 10. ↩︎
