Good Plagiarism: Education in Copying Christ

The school in which it is most decisive to be a student

Philosopher with Mirror, copy after Jusepe de Ribera (cropped; source)

Claudinegate

In the news recently we have been treated to the disgraceful episode of a famous university’s president taking grossly irresponsible political stances and committing manifest violations of the rules of authorial integrity (i.e., she plagiarized like nobody’s business). The purpose of this essay, however, is not to expend time and energy commenting on “Claudinegate” (“Gaygate” doesn’t quite work), but to ask a different and better question: Is there a legitimate form of plagiarizing that students and indeed faculty should be engaging in constantly?

The answer is yes: it is the intellectual, moral, and spiritual copying of Christ, the imitatio Christi that should descend even to the words and phrases we think in and write in.

Look at a towering figure like St Bernard of Clairvaux, a beacon of light to the whole of twelfth-century Europe. It is impossible to read more than a few sentences without encountering words, phrases, whole sentences lifted from Scripture and tweaked this way or that to serve his immediate purpose. It is a dazzling display of synthesis between human language and divine; “My thoughts are not your thoughts,” the Lord said in Scripture, but reading Bernard one realizes that by the end of his life he could truthfully say to the Lord: “Your thoughts are my thoughts.”

This implies an art of serious reading. In a forthcoming book on the Book of Job, Gene Fendt writes about the scribes who copied out manuscripts:

Living in an age when, if a book was saved, it was saved by the person who wished to save it by copying it word for word, I suppose one would be more serious about one’s reading. It is taking a serious part of your life to copy it out. Why copy it out if it does not speak to you of your life?... The printing press, like the copy machine or the internet, increases geometrically the production of babble, but wisdom remains what it always has been, something each person must copy over word for word in his own voice, with her own hand. It takes a serious part of your life to copy it out.... More likely it takes all of one’s life to copy wisdom word for word in one’s own voice and hand.

The Exodus, Horace William Petherick (1839–1919) (source)

What is education all about, anyway?

Education, from the Latin ex-ducere, means “to lead out”—so the logical question is, lead out from what? From ignorance, error, and sin, into knowledge, truth, and holiness. It is a reflection of the journey of Israel, led from slavery in Egypt to freedom in Canaan: that archetypal journey onto which all subsequent religious journeys are mapped. True education presupposes the Christian revelation of man’s fallen plight and of the wisdom from above that can heal him and elevate him.

Admittedly, there is no merely human teacher who is altogether free from ignorance, error, and sin. But, as we know, some sins are qualitatively worse than others; some errors are more massive and pernicious than others; and some kinds of ignorance are far more terrible than others. Teachers do not have to be already perfect to be effective guides to the Eternal and Incarnate Wisdom that stands beyond all of us. As long as they are tethered to the truth that sets us free, as long as they hint at the beauty of holiness, as long as they exemplify a hunger and thirst for reality, their students will be blessed indeed. Their students will catch a glimpse of what it means to be fully alive in Christ.

The point of Catholic education is not to form perfect beings on the model of already perfect beings but to initiate a lifetime of apprenticeship to the one true Master, Jesus Christ, freeing the mind from the debris of a collapsing culture and freeing the heart from the shackles of self-centered desire. Students who receive such an education are granted the opportunity to find a spiritual freedom that is more precious than all the riches of this world. And when they go out into the world after graduation, they will prove, over time, to be the leaven that lifts the loaves, the salt that flavors the food.