You are invited to attend our next monthly meeting to be held on Friday, February 13th from 4:00pm to 5:30pm. We will be discussing “Truly Defective Words: Teaching and the Sacramental Imagination” by Daniel R. Gibbons from the Summer 2025 issue entitled “Education” (Volume 52.2).
Here are excerpt from the Introduction to the issue:
If words cannot fully capture the realities they signify, is truth communicated by them? In “Truly Defective Words: Teaching and the Sacramental Imagination,” Daniel Gibbons asks what it means to teach through signs that are always, in some sense, inadequate. Beginning from Augustine’s conviction that no one can truly teach without grace, and extending through Aquinas’s account of the natural efficacy of signs, Gibbons explores what it would mean for both literature and pedagogy to be “sacramental.” If sacraments are “visible signs of invisible grace,” then the literary word operates in an analogous sense: not primarily conveying ideas, but, as he writes, forming “habits of love—good or bad habits, depending on what we are reading and how carefully we shield our hearts while performing it.” Words, in this view, are “signs . . . that draw people’s attention to something other than themselves,” pointing beyond their own meaning toward the invisible reality they signify. Gibbons challenges the didactic impulse common to classrooms both in secular and religiously affiliated institutions, that is, the desire to translate poems and stories into moral or theological propositions. Through figures such as Chaucer and Sidney, he shows that Christian literature resists such reduction. Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales leaves readers not with certainty but with contradiction and repentance, while Sidney argues paradoxically that poetry may be “the least lyer” because it never claims to assert literal truth. In both, language teaches by shaping affections rather than delivering doctrine, moving readers to love the good through beauty and signification. At the heart of Gibbons’s argument is the Eucharist, which he calls the supreme “sign of contradiction.” In the Consecration, the substance of bread and wine is wholly changed into the Body and Blood of Christ, even as their appearances remain. This paradox of the Real Presence, where the sensible signs conceal what they reveal, offers the pattern for all truly Christian poetics. Such signs, he writes, “un-mean as much as they mean,” disclosing truth through the humility of form rather than clarity of concept. The liturgy itself forms the imagination not by conveying information but by shaping dispositions of faith, repentance, and gratitude through embodied speech. Teaching literature, then, must follow the same logic. To read well is not to master a work’s meaning but to dwell with it, allowing its signs to work upon the imagination. The teacher’s task is not to solve mystery but to cultivate docility before it, to help students become, in the phrase from the Gospel of John, “docible of God.” In that humility of attention, words may again become sacramental: “defective” in themselves, but made efficacious through the grace that empowers them to disclose the realities they signify.
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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