You are invited to attend our next monthly meeting to be held on Friday, December 12th from 4:00pm to 5:30pm.
We will be discussing “The Symbolic Formation of the Heart: On the Art of Conversion” by D.C. Schindler from the Summer 2025 issue entitled “Education” (Volume 52.2). The article can be downloaded from here.
Here are excerpt from the Introduction to the issue:
Education, Plato tells us, is the “art of turning around the whole soul.” In “The Symbolic Formation of the Heart: On the Art of Conversion,” D.C. Schindler takes up this claim and asks what it means for a human being to be reoriented toward reality in that comprehensive sense. Schindler interprets this reorientation not as a merely intellectual alteration, but as a transformation of the whole person: per se unum, body and soul. In this conversion, the soul, notes Schindler, can turn only around its own “center,” which Schindler locates in the heart. Following Aristotle and Aquinas, he describes the heart not as a mere metaphor for emotion but as the first mover of the living organism, the visible principle through which the soul gives life to the body. The heart is the meeting point between interior and exterior life, between knowing and loving. Against modern viewpoints that divide spirit from matter, Schindler insists that the heart is not simply a symbol of unity but a symbol that is itself unity: the joining together (sym-ballein) of body and soul, of the physical and the spiritual. If education, therefore, is to move the person as a whole, it must be directed toward this center. The heart, being symbolic by nature, is moved not by abstract information but by symbols, that is, by embodied forms that make meaning present. True pedagogy is not simply techniques, then, but formation, which takes places through ritual, imagination, and memory. These are habits that dispose the heart to recognize truth, goodness, and beauty as realities that are always-already given. Imagination, for Schindler, is the place where meaning becomes incarnate, where the soul learns to dwell with what it knows. Memory likewise belongs to the heart’s life: to “learn by heart” is to receive form into oneself, to interiorize the whole of something. All genuine teaching is thus symbolic: it communicates life through the embodied presence of the teacher, who becomes “a signpost, in his very person, that points to the truth, beauty, and goodness of reality.” The teacher, however, does not “produce” the conversion of the student, but enables him to receive it, as a “soul-shaking discovery of what was always-already there, always-already given—which is precisely what it means to receive the real as a gift.”
We will meet in the Kateri Room located at St. Michael’s Church, 240 Hemlock Street, Waterloo, Ontario. Use the east side parking lot and enter by the rear doors. Walk up the stairs. The Kateri Room is on your right before you enter the church proper.
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