Classical Learning and the Catholic Mind: The Poetical Tradition as Formation

Matthew Mehan, associate dean and professor of government studies at Hillsdale College's Washington, D.C. campus, holds a doctorate in literature from the University of Dallas. He is also a father of eight and co-founder of a school cooperative in Reston, Virginia, with 38 participating families. The combination matters: his argument about classical learning is not primarily a theoretical one.

In a recent interview with EWTN News leading up to the 250th anniversary of the United States, Mehan identified a specific gap in contemporary Catholic academic formation. Catholics, he said, often know their Greek philosophers and can cite the Summa Theologica and Augustine. What they frequently lack is fluency in the poetical and rhetorical tradition — the imaginative and affective inheritance that cultivates virtue not through argument alone, but through story, image, and sentiment working together.

"What they don't know is the poetical and rhetorical tradition which moves people toward a common vision, which is an indispensable part of good letters and a healthy citizenry," he told EWTN News.

This is a structural claim about formation, not a stylistic preference.

The person before the proposition

The Catholic Christian Meta-Model of the Person understands the human being as an integrated whole: intellect, will, memory, imagination, emotion, and body, oriented by nature toward the True, the Good, and the Beautiful.[^1] Formation that addresses only one register of that whole is incomplete. A person is not changed primarily by propositions. People are changed by narrative, by beauty, by encounter — by the kind of formation that reaches the imagination and affective life before it reaches the rational faculty.

Rhetoric moves the will. Poetry engages the imagination. Fable forms the moral sense in ways a syllogism cannot. These are not decorative additions to serious intellectual formation. They are, as Mehan argues, indispensable.

His recent book, The American Book of Fables, reflects this conviction. The fables are set in the American landscape, framed by the Declaration of Independence, and accompanied by historical documents that illustrate the country's history, complexity, and geographical regions. The work integrates the aesthetic, the moral, and the civic, because persons integrate these dimensions whether or not educators design for that integration.

Mehan described the project as an expression of fides et ratio — faith and reason. "I wanted something like in church, where there is a papal flag and an American flag, representing faith, morals, love of country, and love of neighbor," he said. The Heritage Foundation awarded him the America 250 Innovation Prize for the work.

Formation in thick human contexts

One of the most consistent findings in developmental psychology is that protective factors for human flourishing are relational and communal before they are institutional. The school cooperative model Mehan and his wife built reflects that principle directly: formation happens in communities that share a vision, families that read together, children who grow up in an environment where beauty, virtue, and civic identity are woven into daily life rather than delivered as curriculum modules.

Mehan also noted that doctorates now function as the equivalent of 19th-century master's degrees in terms of genuine academic formation. The inflation of credentials without corresponding depth is not a peripheral concern. It points to a reductive model of the person — one that equates knowledge with information and formation with certification.

Recovering the full inheritance

The Greco-Roman, Judeo-Christian, and Catholic vision of Western civilization did not survive for two millennia by argumentation alone. It survived because it was embodied in liturgy, in art, in story, in architecture, in the practices of communities that handed on a way of life. The intellectual articulation of that tradition — in Augustine, in Aquinas, in the great scholastics — was always accompanied by the imaginative and aesthetic tradition that made the vision inhabitable.[^2]

To recover one without the other is to recover a skeleton without a body.

Mehan's concern is that Catholic academics know the philosophers and know the modern critics who reject the classical inheritance. What they have not always preserved is the living tradition that connects that vision to human hearts in each generation. The work of renewal — in education, in community formation, in the cultivation of virtue across generations — requires the full register of what forms a person. Arguments are necessary. Data matters. Philosophical clarity is not optional. But none of these reach the person at the level where lasting change occurs without the poetical and rhetorical tradition working alongside them.

A person formed only in information, without the imaginative and affective formation that beautiful letters provide, may know what is good without being moved toward it. The person who has been formed by story, image, and moral sentiment alongside philosophical argument possesses something more: a will already inclined toward what the intellect recognizes. That is what classical formation was always trying to produce — and what its recovery, now, would actually accomplish.

Source: EWTN News, "Catholic scholar says classical learning can help renew America," June 28, 2026.

References

[^1]: Paul Vitz, William Nordling, and Craig Steven Titus, A Catholic Christian Meta-Model of the Person (2020). [^2]: Hans Urs von Balthasar, The Glory of the Lord, vol. 5 (1991), p. 164.