Imitation and Innovation
 
“Now appoint a king to lead us, such as all the other nations have.”

• 1 Samuel 8:5

 
“Arise, Jerusalem, and shine like the sun; The glory of the Lord is shining on you! Other nations will be covered by darkness, But on you the light of the Lord will shine; The brightness of his presence will be with you.”

• Isaiah 60:1-2

 

Introduction

The constant temptation of the Israelites in Sacred Scripture is to turn away from the living God and worship false gods.  Even though the primary and fundamental commandments consistently enjoin them to worship God and not bow down to idols, the Chosen People are frequently consumed with the desire to follow Baal, Ashterah, Molech, and so on.
 
And although the “mystery of iniquity” is ultimately beyond our understanding, and the reason for idolatry in this or that instance is not always given, the Scriptures provide sufficient dramatic representations of the phenomenon to suggest that a fundamental cause of this primary sin is, ultimately, a mimetic or imitative one.  The Israelites desire what the people of the surrounding nations have or desire; thus, they choose to desire the false gods that their neighbors desire.
 
The Book of Judges is clear: “Then the Israelites did evil in the eyes of the Lord and served the Baals. They forsook the Lord, the God of their ancestors, who had brought them out of Egypt. They followed and worshiped various gods of the peoples around them” (Judges 2:11-12). The Israelites do not make up new gods; they are not generating heresies out of confusion in their reading of Scripture.   Rather, they are following gods based solely on “the peoples around them.”  Coveting the neighbors’ goods is, in this light, deeply tied the idolatrous desire.
 
Furthermore, even when God Himself presents his Authority and Providence as sufficient for them, the People of God demand that they have a king “such as all the other nations have.” We learn from this that even the mode of government and cultural development of a nation can take shape in imitation of the surrounding nations, and this imitation will displease God if it is based on a failure to imitate His Will – His Desire – first.
 
At the same time, the more Israel adheres to God, leans on God, and imitates His Will in her desire and action, the more she develops as a thriving and unique nation among the nations.  She becomes a “light to the nations” and “shines like the sun.” This glory is unique: Israel stands out among the rest of the peoples, and something new in her way of living and being emerges on the scene.  She has a set of laws and promises that allow her to forge a new culture, new people, and new face of humanity. Today, we would call the transformations that lead a nation like Israel into this out-standing glory as effective innovation.
 
The mimetic reading of the Old Testament, originating in Girard and Schwager but now proposed by the likes of Bishop Barron and accepted by the likes of our Vice President, J. D. Vance, is a theological framework for understanding the role of Catholic schools in their cultural, academic, and evangelical development.  This essay considers good and bad imitation, good and bad innovation, positive imitation and innovation in the history of Donahue Academy, and implications of this study for the development and growth of Catholic schools.

Good and Bad Imitation

Aristotle observes that “man is the most imitative (mimetic) of the animals,” and Girard synthesizes the work of the great novelists to show that this mimetic nature of man includes desire.  We desire what others desire.  Aristotle continues: from this imitation, “children learn their earliest lessons.”   Mimesis – and, by extension, mimetic desire -- is at the core of education and learning.
 
Mimesis allows children to adapt language, customs, and behaviors of the society in which they live.  It helps them develop skills in various trades, hobbies, and games.  It cements proper religious worship. After all, children learn their first words, activities, and religious gestures simply by copying those around them.
 
Since it is part of our created nature, mimesis in man is, ultimately, ordered toward a personal imitation of the divine will that participates in a social or cultural reflection of God’s desire for us in Christ.  God, Himself, we know from revelation, is an interpersonal imitation of will and desire: the Son submits to the Father’s plan, and the Father is ready to give everything to His Son.  Hence, the imitative nature of man is an outstanding manifestation of his image and likeness of God, and man is called to deepen his participation in the divine mimetic will.
 
In general, all imitation that flows from the primordial call to follow God is ultimately good. At the same time, we are aware of many bad models of action and desire.   We are often lured by “the glamour of evil,” as the baptismal liturgical expression aptly phrases it.
 
What constitutes this glamour?  One tradition describes the attraction of evil in terms of the “triple concupiscence”: the lust of the flesh, the lust of the eyes, and the pride of life (1 Jn 2:16).   These three define the attraction of power, money, pleasure, status, unnecessary knowledge, and any kind of disordered desire for a worldly good. We are each individually -- and also socially as a collective body -- constantly beset by temptations to follow models who appear to have these qualities.  Just as ancient Israel would begin to sacrifice to a false god to try to acquire these illusory glamorous elements in the neighboring nations, so do we as individuals or groups sacrifice our being-in-Christ to run after these idols today.
 
That being said, is this all there is?  Are we really just imitating one another ceaselessly?  How could any inventions or new ideas have emerged in the world if all we’ve ever done is imitate?  How do we explain artistic novelties, the diversity of the saints, or even the multiplicity of languages if imitation is all there is?
 
In order to get a fuller picture of human development we need also consider innovation.

Good and Bad Innovation

Only God can create.  That is, only God can bring something out of nothing: produce being when and where there are no beings pre-existing.  All other created creatures can only make new things from pre-existing material.  And yet, because we humans are open to an infinite desire to become like God, to live in God, to participate in His Will, we, too, desire to create.  Knowing this, God allows us to participate in his creative activity in this world.
 
With each human person, God desires a special and unique plan and purpose; the same holds for each country, each town, each business, and each Catholic school.   Thus, God desires a growth and development in each institution that is imitative of the best He has given man thus far and open to becoming the now-invisible and as-yet-unknown plan which He desires in His creative activity.  Each man is called to imitate the known patterns of God’s Holy Will and remain open to the new dimensions of God’s creative activity in this world.   Christ says, “I have much more to say to you, more than you can now bear. But when he, the Spirit of truth, comes, he will guide you into all the truth” (John 16:12-23).  We are, thus, emboldened to remain open to the teaching of the Holy Spirit even when the newness of His work can seem “unbearable.”
 
In modern corporate development, the word for this newness and creative action is called innovation. Innovation is certainly at the heart of the most basic thrust of what Adam Smith called The Wealth of Nations. In Chapter One of his magnum opus, Smith notes that division of labor allows for the reality that “common workmen, who, being each of them employed in some very simple operation, naturally turn[ed] their thoughts towards finding out easier and readier methods of performing it.” Innovation drives the development of new and more effective capital which allows for continual increase in the standard of living of human civilization; it fuels the wealth of nations.
 
At the same time, our culture has turned “newness” itself into an idol.   Innovation for its own sake is often sought at the expense of real authentic development toward the good.   The desire to innovate can become an end in itself both as a response to rivalry or even a rejection of imitation as such.  Thus, a company may decide that it needs to stay up-to-date with the “latest technology” and buy tools and programs that are simply wasted or even harmful to its own growth.  Similarly, an organization may feel a pressure to innovate when, in fact, what is best is to perfect what is already in place.
 
In the arts, we see countless examples of good and bad innovation.  The Renaissance is certainly an example of excellent artistic innovation, while much of modern art is a wasteland of sterility and “uncreativity.”  Notably, the Renaissance artists saw themselves as faithful to imitation of the greats, while modern artists seem to imitate each other's desire for uniqueness without producing anything other than banal copies of the same triviality.

Imitation and Innovation

It is worth, then, pursuing the connection between imitation and innovation.  Is there a way to determine the proper balance between the two?   On the one hand, we find that healthy and good imitation can produce cultural and economic growth.  Meanwhile, over time, as humans imitate what they have received, they tend, as Adam Smith noted, to seek improvements and developments.   They naturally innovate from the basic practices that they first imitated.
 
Moreover, it is fair to say that the talented artist or inventor is one who is able to open his mind to the creative power of God and, finally, imitate an exemplum within God's mind that was previously hidden to man.  In this path of innovation, the positive and healthy imitation of others gives birth to an imitation of God as creator.  This is authentic innovation.
 
On the other hand, as we have seen, bad role models will only produce bad fruit, the unoriginal production of idolatry. Bad models send us down the infernal spiraling descent of lust for pleasure, knowledge, and power that turn us away from being authentic innovators living in God's creative will. When we follow the desires of “this world” we find with an emptiness that “there is nothing new under the sun.”
 
In the worst case scenario, we see the “modern art” phenomenon in which the artist must “create” without any role models.   In this mindset, only art which doesn’t imitate is considered good.  This leads to the worst form of hidden imitation as everyone imitates the desire for uniqueness and ends up looking identical to everyone else producing nothing authentically new or innovative.
 
As René Girard explains in his essay, Innovation and Repetition, “real change can only take root when it springs from the type of coherence that tradition alone provides. Tradition can only be successfully challenged from the inside. The main prerequisite for real innovation is a minimal respect for the past, and a mastery of its achievements, i. e. mimesis. To expect novelty to cleanse itself of imitation is to expect a plant to grow with its roots up in the air. In the long run, the obligation always to rebel may be more destructive of novelty than the obligation never to rebel.”[1]
 
Faithful imitation of good role models combined with an openness to the ideas that perfect current practices or better fit the known mission established by God allow natural imitation to be elevated to a supernatural mimesis that culminates in an innovation.

Positive Imitation and Innovation in the History of Donahue Academy

Donahue Academy, as a Catholic classical school, would seem to be, on the outset, a radically imitative and non-innovative school.  If there is a classical school movement, it is always, it seems, designed as a rejection of the latest fashions, trends, and so-called innovations of modern educational theory.  Moreover, if there is a fundamental dynamism to Catholic education it is to open students to eternal truths and allow them to encounter the same Jesus Christ of yesterday, today, and tomorrow so that they may obtain the exact same heaven of every saint from every age.  One does not lightly innovate the faith!  And there shouldn’t be much to innovate in a Catholic classical school.

At the same time, our experience in attempting to restore education in Ave Maria is that we continue to make profound and world-historical innovations that make us the leader in K-12 education.  The Malthus project remains the poster-child for this reality.  Begun as a radical imitation of the best of mathematical and scientific teaching, the gradual discovery of the various connections between the disciplines and their link to the most important modern cultural agenda of Catholic social teaching allowed an innovation in education that has obtained international recognition.   
 
At first, a math teacher seeks a real-world example of linear and exponential functions that would be relevant to Catholic 11th graders in a regular-level course; he wants to make the math relevant and begins looking at Malthus’s work.  The classical model demands that the teacher go to the sources, so the “ad fontes” principle allows an actual study of “The Essay on Population.”
 
Meanwhile, a science teacher working on key ideas for 11th graders sees a link between Darwin and Malthus and shares this connection with the math teacher.  
 
Years pass. The teachers move on to other positions.   The project stagnates.  But the connection is remembered.
 
Then, an administrative act of fortune allows some to resurrect the project.  The humanities teacher, already accustomed toward fusing the disciplines, is invited to guide the research paper and presentations (within a Thomistic quodlibetal framework) and introduce the famous Dickens’ Christmas Carol line about the “surplus population.”  Meanwhile, a now-robust statistics program allows the 11^th grade study of functions to incorporate regression analysis in light of the questions of math modeling that are pertinent to the study as a whole. And since it is a Catholic school, the 11th graders are already reading Humanae Vitae.  
 
In time, the group of 11th grade teachers, now all working in tandem to show these connections to the students in light of the rhetoric stage mode of teaching, discover that Pope Francis described Humanae Vitae as a response to the “Malthusian” climate of the time.  The project now has, in a sense, “Magisterial” blessing.  It is new, different, innovative; Population Research Institute explains that “Most American children graduate from high school thinking that the world is overpopulated and that the socially responsible thing to do is not to have children. Not the students at the Donahue Academy in Ave Maria, Florida, however. The teachers at this Catholic academy in Southwest Florida have put together an interdisciplinary program that exposes the too-many-people myth for the fraud that it is.”[2] The school is, thus, an innovator in Catholic, classical education.
 
But the innovation was not sought; it was discovered.  We might even say that it was received.  The teachers who have participated in its development simply imitated the pedagogical techniques of the school’s tradition, the synthetic mode of thinking, and the magisterial teachings of the Church.  Then, they opened themselves up to the potential for a better way to help students encounter what is eternally true in light of the world in which they must live as well-educated Catholics.  If there is an innovation here it is simply through the imitation of all the desires opened up by the core principles of Catholic classical education that govern the school. Donahue Academy is a flagship school teaching exactly what the Church wants (imitation) in an entirely new way (innovation).
 
Similar examples of innovation could be cited in the development of the advanced Latin class as well as the methodology assumed in the language department that has allowed students to flourish according to their developmental capacities. Or the statistics class, as it has become more and more of an icon of Catholic classical math teaching at a time when few acknowledge the course as such.  Or the science topics class which is cutting edge in so many ways while simultaneously seeking only to assist the Church in connecting faith and science. Or even the senior thesis which has gone through so many developments all of which stemmed from an attempt to imitate the scholastics.  And so on.  Each example is built on an imitation of some model and then grows and builds according to the divine model manifested in the mission.

Imitation Against Innovation in Schools

Conversely, a school might find that, in situations where it adopts someone else’s curriculum or regulatory plan, it limits the school’s capacity to innovate and develop; in some cases, a school can be “punished” in the budget by having to pay lots of money to sustain discipleship of someone else’s vision.
 
To be sure, books must be purchased; teachers and administrators need to work with publishers who devise curriculum; and not everything can be one’s own.  However, the greatest developments and innovations – the effective perfections of our work as a Catholic school – happen when teachers can build off of a set foundation and then open those texts to the dynamism of the school’s mission.   Then something new, something imitating the mind of God emerges.
 
But the danger of surrendering one’s own teaching to someone else’s curriculum should not be underestimated.  In the worst case scenario, we can adopt a curriculum or product that is laced with one or several modern ideologies in a way that ends up harming the very formation of the children.
 
On the other hand, change and innovation, although apparently healthy, can have long term negative effects.  Unguided and frequent changes in a curriculum can leave one’s pedagogy shallow and ineffective.  Without curricular stability, innovations of the Malthus study kind (described above) cannot happen.
 
In general, it seems that the initial phase of any successful program begins as largely mimetic of some previously established educational practice that is then incorporated into the Catholic classical principles.  Over time, with stability and frequent self examination as well as interpersonal conversation, faculty can move from standard imitation into a new face of supernatural imitation, a perfection of that pedagogy in light of the Church's desire for the renewal of Catholic education.

Implications

In light of these reflections, it appears that some principles for the continual growth of Catholic schools can be highlighted.   First, at all times, we are called to follow Jesus Christ and, therefore, imitate his desire, his will, his mind in our time.  This means fidelity to the Church teaching, witness to growth in holiness, and consistent sacramental living.  It also means prayer for guidance in the discernment of pathways forward or developments within.  Imitatio Christi is the binding norm for all of our activities.
 
Thus, no new curriculum or practice can be adopted if it is not faithful to the Magisterium or at least not opposed to it.   Moreover, the school should be careful not to take secular government handouts if these have the potential to bond the school in the future to some worldly agenda. In general, although imitation of worldly models is a valid first step toward the fullness of imitatio Christi, it should always be in line with an intentional discernment of the hand of God involved in the original source of that model.
 
Second, we are called to have an openness to the work of the Holy Spirit; wherever and whenever we can open the current practices to a more robust penetration of the Catholic classical mission, the more we are open to the kind of innovation for which we can confidently claim to be the leading school in the world. To assist this type of docility, we should encourage prayer, reflection, study, conversation, and writing on the definition and implication of the Catholic classical mission as it defines the renewal of pedagogical formation.
 
At the same time, experience shows that when we lock ourselves in with someone else’s regulations, curriculum, standards, or requirements, we run the risk of closing off the work of the Spirit in our particular school. Whereas obedience to external laws is important, a careful attention to the principle of subsidiarity as well as the defect of law in particular cases as described by Thomas in ST I-II q. 94 a.2 is essential to keeping ourselves open to God’s will for our desire.
 
This openness is synonymous with the call to discernment; it means continual examination of our institutional and even personal intentions.  The call to examination of conscience on a frequent basis is necessary, for the “devil prowls around seeking to ruin souls.” This discernment should culminate not simply in an avoidance of bad models of desire but also in an embrace of God's new directives, his ever present creative desire renewing the face of the earth.
 
This is, for Pope Francis, the culmination of inviting the Holy Spirit into discernment. 
We should always remember that discernment is a grace. Even though it includes reason and prudence, it goes beyond them, for it seeks a glimpse of that unique and mysterious plan that God has for each of us, which takes shape amid so many varied situations and limitations. It involves more than my temporal well-being, my satisfaction at having accomplished something useful, or even my desire for peace of mind. It has to do with the meaning of my life before the Father who knows and loves me, with the real purpose of my life, which nobody knows better than he. . . . The Lord speaks to us in a variety of ways, at work, through others and at every moment. Yet we simply cannot do without the silence of prolonged prayer, which enables us better to perceive God’s language, to interpret the real meaning of the inspirations we believe we have received, to calm our anxieties and to see the whole of our existence afresh in his own light. In this way, we allow the birth of a new synthesis that springs from a life inspired by the Spirit.
Nonetheless, it is possible that, even in prayer itself, we could refuse to let ourselves be confronted by the freedom of the Spirit, who acts as he wills. We must remember that prayerful discernment must be born of a readiness to listen: to the Lord and to others, and to reality itself, which always challenges us in new ways. Only if we are prepared to listen, do we have the freedom to set aside our own partial or insufficient ideas, our usual habits and ways of seeing things. In this way, we become truly open to accepting a call that can shatter our security, but lead us to a better life. It is not enough that everything be calm and peaceful. God may be offering us something more, but in our comfortable inadvertence, we do not recognize it (GeE 170-172).

Conclusion

Of all the areas in which one should never innovate, it seems that the deposit of faith is that place.  One does not mess with dogma unless one wishes to join the heretics.  At the same, the Church has a tradition within the tradition, an aspect of revelation within revelation of faith, that allows for development of doctrine.   Thus, even the statements of dogma can change or, we might say, innovate. 
 
The process through which the Church develops doctrine is aligned with the principles of imitation, time, discernment, and trust in revelation outlined in this essay.  The Church continues to listen to the voice of the Holy Spirit and after long periods of imitating what has come before, she receives a new element that develops what has been and, in a sense, discovers what has been there all along.
 
The flagship school is one which models innovations, for sure, but, above all, the flagship Catholic classical school is the one which models faithful imitation of the Lord’s will with a humble acceptance of the new and innovative truths God wishes to impact on that school’s journey to perfection.
 
We are wise not to seek innovation but to receive it; we are wise to open our minds and hearts to receive these innovations as the fruit of our radical imitation of the Lord's will in all things.  And we do so by putting all things at the service of our special Catholic classical mission in Ave Maria.
 
The model for this path to wisdom is Mary at the Annunciation. Moments before the Archangel visits her, she is a perfect imitation of all of the goals, values, and desires of Israel. At the same time, she is totally open to whatever new plan God has in store for her, for Israel, and for the world. Her fiat is already ready to be given, her desire totally open to imitate any path of the divine will, her soul completely ready for any mission from God: even to be named the mother of the Messiah.  Mary is the model of imitation open to innovation at the moment when Gabriel appears and salutes: Ave Maria.