The Glory of Mimetic Teaching

August 5, 2022

Written By: Andrew Kern

Originally published in Classis
Spring 2025, Volume XXXII Issue 2

It is the business of education to wait upon Pentecost. Unhappily, there is something about educational syllabuses, and especially about examination papers, which seems to be rather out of harmony with Pentecostal manifestations…. But Pentecost will happen, whether within or without official education…. No incarnate Idea is altogether devoid of Power.¹

The Moment

One is your teacher, even Christ.

Matthew 23:10

There is a moment teachers live for, when the teacher’s witness, the student’s receptivity, and the spirit of the lesson converge in the soul of the learner, a spark ignites, and the student is lit up. It’s the moment when Archimedes cried, “Eureka!”, when Dante’s weariness evaporated and he begged his guide to hasten their journey, when the student struggling with a math concept perceives the missing principle and, sometimes with relief, sometimes with joy, sometimes with ecstasy, whispers or says or shouts, “I get it.”

This is the moment to which every element of the lesson points, for which every word of the teacher is spoken, by which every act of the student is measured. It is the moment for which the school was built, the leadership provides support, and, to be personal, for which I do everything as a teacher, mentor, speaker, consultant, and executive.

The name for this moment is learning. What the student feels in that moment, we call the joy of learning. The privilege of the teacher – indeed, the glory of the teacher – is to play a role in that moment. The privilege of the student is to experience it. The purpose of this article is to see it multiplied.

We swim in a great variety of teaching techniques and methods, curricular philosophies and resources, educational theories and practices, learning styles and medications.

This dynamic variation expresses the nature of education: a complex activity by which mysteries called persons experience a mystery called learning. Unfortunately, such a dynamic variety easily descends into chaos, which makes us vulnerable, insecure, and gullible.

So the question arises: is there anything big enough to unite all these elements into a common purpose? To turn to the Greeks for a word: is there a logos or unifying principle?

For the Christian, to ask the question is to see its answer. Of course, there is a logos. In fact, we proclaim Christ The Logos. But a follow-up question seems irresistible: how did we get from joy of learning to Christ the Logos? Or to reverse ourselves, how can we get from Christ the Logos to the joy of learning?

This article attempts to answer that question.

What’s coming

In what follows, I claim that Christ the Logos gives us the form of teaching, clarifying the role of the teacher and student in the journey to The Moment. We call this form of instruction “mimetic teaching,” which I believe is the purest and most comprehensive expression of Christian classical pedagogy. I will describe it and indicate resources for further research.

First, however, since my title is “the glory of mimetic teaching”, I need to explain what I mean by glory.

On Glory

In Exodus 33, Moses asks the Lord: “Show me Your glory,” and the Lord replies, “I will make all my goodness pass before you, and I will proclaim the Name of the Lord before you… But, you cannot see My face.”

This passage offers the archetypal description of how God’s glory can be experienced: It is beyond us (you cannot see My face). As Paul says, God is “eternal, immortal, invisible” (I Timothy). Yet it contains all His goodness, which we can see in its parts (I Cor 13) and His Name, which we must revere. It seems that when His goodness is, as it were, divided into parts, we can see those parts, at least if we are prepared.

By analogy, God gives everything He makes its unique glory. Ultimately, any such God-spoken glory is a mystery that can never exhaust what God intends and means when He says its name. Yet we can see how its goodness is revealed to us, and we can learn its name.² Thus, we find a pattern we can follow to know the glory of a thing. First, accept its mystery. Then ask, “What are its goodnesses?” (ie, what good qualities does it possess? What good results does it affect? What good things can it do? Etc.) Finally, listen for its name.

The Glory of Mimetic Teaching

What do we learn about the glory of mimetic teaching if we allow for its mystery, look for its “goodnesses”, and listen for its name? Mimetic teaching is teaching in the form of Christ. But what could that mean? What is “the form of Christ”?

The form of Christ is the Incarnate Logos.

The apostle John revealed that Jesus is the Logos of God and that the Logos became flesh. As a result, the apostles beheld His glory, uniquely “the glory of the only begotten of the Father, full of grace and truth.”

The authors of the epistle to the Hebrews pick up this theme, naming Christ “the radiance of His glory.” The radiance of light is that portion of light that we can see. Similarly, Christ the Son became, as it were, that “portion” of God’s glory that falls within the range of what we can see. John could say, “We beheld His glory” because His glory was made radiant in Christ when Christ became flesh.

In what follows, I claim that Christ the Logos gives us the form of teaching, clarifying the role of the teacher and student in the journey to The Moment. We call this form of instruction “mimetic teaching,” which I believe is the purest and most comprehensive expression of Christian classical pedagogy.

The form of Christ, then, is the Incarnate Logos, which enables us to see His glory. And mimetic teaching is teaching in that form When we teach mimetically, we incarnate a logos.

To deepen our understanding of teaching, then, we need to understand the two fundamental ideas of logos and incarnation. Let’s start with incarnations.

Types

The pattern of incarnating a logos began before Christ fulfilled it as God made man. Indeed, God spent millennia preparing for the birth of the incarnate Word. He had been revealing Christ to us in what I will awkwardly call “sub-incarnations,” both in the Old Testament and in creation (I confess to adapting Tolkien’s notion of sub-creation without his permission). Historically, these “sub-incarnations” have been called types.

A type is an image, often impressed on wax, of an “archetype” or source of the type. The Old Testament is filled with types of Christ: specific actions, liturgies, objects, and even people intended to prepare the people of God to receive the Logos when He comes.

The creation is also filled with sub-incarnations or types that reveal truths about Christ. For example, He is the “sun of righteousness,” the “fountain of living water,” and the “morning star.” When we look at the creation, our Lord teaches us about His Son in the types He spoke into being. Thus, we see types of Christ the Logos in the Old Testament and in the Creation.

Logos and Logoi

Logos is a Greek word that means many things, especially a message or an ordering or governing principle. When we speak of Christ the Logos, we partly mean that He is the ordering principle of all things. When we speak of other logoi, we mean that they are subordinate principles that govern smaller things, like the logos of a lesson, which determines what to include and what to avoid.

Christ is the capital lambda Logos, while the creation is filled with what we can call “small ‘l’ logoi” (plural for logos). In less textured English, Christ is The Word and you and I and every created thing or principle is a word.

Other logoi are “small ‘l’ logoi”: logoi spoken by God and therefore truths, principles, or patterns that reveal truths about but are not Him, as Christ is. These can be found in the Scriptures and/or the creation. Both the Old Testament and the creation reveal truths about, for example, the kingdom of heaven, the moral order, or the human soul.

The Pattern: Embodied Logoi

Each of these is a logos, invisible and immaterial. We can understand none of them unless they are embodied.

The New Testament continues this pattern: a principle or truth (logos) is embodied in types (incarnated). Our Lord and the apostles use parables, signs and wonders, allegories, object lessons, and visions to explain what the Old Testament and the creation reveal. These are types of created logoi.³

Thus we learn about the kingdom of heaven by contemplating mustard seeds, the moral law by going to the ant, and the structure of the soul by participating in temple worship. Created logoi follow the pattern revealed in Christ: you come to know a logos when it is embodied or incarnated. Eternal truths are embodied and made visible to our senses through the imagination, by parables, actions, rituals, and even miracles. 

Natural Logoi

In the creation, we encounter created logoi of another order, which we might call natural. For example, cosmological, chemical, biological, and mathematical truths are embodied in created objects in time and space. These logoi reveal truths about God, but indirectly, which is why they are often turned into idols or skepticism. Yet they remain worth knowing because they are spoken by God. There’s another reason they are worth knowing, which I’ll pick up in the next section. 

Mimetic Logoi

Nicholas Berdyaev wrote, in The Destiny of Man, “God created man in his own image and likeness, i.e., made him a creator too.” When we attend to created logoi, we acquire tools that enable us to imitate the creator in whose image we are made. We create, or, as Tolkien said, sub-create, on the pattern we observe: we make types of logoi. These are mimetic logoi. 

By weighing and measuring real objects on earth or in heaven, we learn to deliberate, judge, reason, generate and test models, and compose music. We learn to use language to express our understanding and appreciation of the things we encounter. And we make things, like poems and cathedrals. 

When we do so, we imitate God. All human activity comes under this pattern: the fine, visual, musical, serving, and liberal arts; the sciences in their inquiry, reasoning, modeling, experimenting, searching, and discovering; practical plans, such as blueprints, rules for games and constitutional law, strategies, and a bewildering array of schemes and activities, each of which pursues a logos as we conceive it in our minds. 

Perhaps above all and certainly most germane to this paper, we imitate God by teaching, for God is always teaching. That is, He is always revealing Himself. The more closely and fittingly we follow His pattern, the more effectively we teach. 

We are always making types of logoi, mimetic, created, or uncreated. The question is whether we do it wisely and well.

 When we speak of Christ the Logos, we partly mean that He is the ordering principle of all things. When we speak of other logoi, we mean that they are subordinate principles that govern smaller things, like the logos of a lesson, which determines what to include and what to avoid.

Teaching Mimetically

Since God teaches this way, we should imitate him. Indeed, by created nature, we do. The times we don’t are the times when the pattern is distorted by some external temptation or threat, of which there are many.

The Archetype of Teaching

We have seen that the mimetic pattern is universal, extending throughout the creation. That creation includes human activities and human activities include teaching, so the mimetic pattern is also the pattern of all teaching. It is universal. It is an archetype.

Whenever anybody teaches or learns anything, they follow this pattern. We even have comic images (types!) to represent it (a light bulb goes on); we use cliches to reduce it to a caricature (show, don’t tell); and we tell tales and myths about people who experience it (Odysseus, Dante, etc.).

For the sake of this article, I will reflect on this pattern using another archetype: a journey, like a pilgrim’s progress, an exodus, or a journey home. These represent the journey of the soul from ignorance to knowledge or darkness to light. Perils and promises permeate even what seems the shortest journey, because light always hurts the darkened eye, and ignorance stops being bliss the moment it is exposed. In every case, the goal of the pilgrim is the logos of the journey: to “get it”, to see it, to understand it, to adore it, to be able to apply it. In short, to be enlightened by the logos and live in that light (John 1:8). Thus, the metaphor of a journey enables us to examine and clarify the role of both teacher and student, and the moment of illumination is the goal of the mimetic journey.

The Mimetic Journey

God guard me from those thoughts men think

In the mind alone,

He that sings a lasting song

Thinks in a marrow bone;”

Yeats, quoted in The Creative Process 108

When a teacher teaches mimetically, she identifies a logos, embodies it in types, and guides a student to the moment of illumination that we call “the joy of learning.” Looking at it this way, we can see three parts to mimetic teaching: the logos, the types, and a guide, which draws to our attention the role of the teacher.

As we examine that role, we come to see a seven stage sequence, each stage of which plays a vital role in that moment of illumination that is the goal of all teaching.

I am going to describe that seven stage sequence, but first, an important caution: when I use the word stages, I do not mean steps in a mechanistic process—a technique by which you can attain a predictable outcome at the end of a repeated process. I mean a journey with seven stages. A journey to Moscow, to Mt. Ararat, or the North Pole will be very different journeys, and yet each will pass through common stages.

For this reason, our best teachers of teaching are not the theorists who analyze what happens when the best teachers teach (as I am doing now). Rather, our best teachers are the storytellers who show us how to teach by teaching: Homer, Vergil, Moses, St. John, Dante, and others. They understand that the traveler and the guide experience different journeys, so in what follows, I will present the mimetic journey twice, once from the teacher’s perspective and once from the student’s.

Also, for simplicity, I will refer to the teacher as “she” and the student as “he”.

The Mimetic Journey

God guard me from those thoughts men think

In the mind alone,

He that sings a lasting song

Thinks in a marrow bone;”

Yeats, quoted in The Creative Process 108

When a teacher teaches mimetically, she identifies a logos, embodies it in types, and guides a student to the moment of illumination that we call “the joy of learning.” Looking at it this way, we can see three parts to mimetic teaching: the logos, the types, and a guide, which draws to our attention the role of the teacher.

As we examine that role, we come to see a seven stage sequence, each stage of which plays a vital role in that moment of illumination that is the goal of all teaching.

I am going to describe that seven stage sequence, but first, an important caution: when I use the word stages, I do not mean steps in a mechanistic process—a technique by which you can attain a predictable outcome at the end of a repeated process. I mean a journey with seven stages. A journey to Moscow, to Mt. Ararat, or the North Pole will be very different journeys, and yet each will pass through common stages.

For this reason, our best teachers of teaching are not the theorists who analyze what happens when the best teachers teach (as I am doing now). Rather, our best teachers are the storytellers who show us how to teach by teaching: Homer, Vergil, Moses, St. John, Dante, and others. They understand that the traveler and the guide experience different journeys, so in what follows, I will present the mimetic journey twice, once from the teacher’s perspective and once from the student’s.

Also, for simplicity, I will refer to the teacher as “she” and the student as “he”.

The Mimetic Journey: Teacher’s Perspective

Stage One, Invitation: Preparing for the Journey

There is none like to Shadowfax… And to you, my other guests, I will offer such things as may be found in my armory. Swords you do not need, but there are helms and coats of mail of cunning work, gifts to my fathers out of Gondor. Choose from these ere you go, and may they serve you well.

J.R.R. Tolkien, The Two Towers

At the beginning of the mimetic journey, the teacher invites her students to join her, prepares them, and most of all ensures they are ready by gathering resources they’ll need for the journey: knowledge, skills, appreciations, and understandings gained on previous journeys. Do they know what they need to know and understand what they need to understand? Are they able to do what they’ll need to do? Do they appreciate or value what they’ll need to value?⁴

Since children can’t learn what they aren’t ready for, the teacher should give this stage significant time and attention (as a rule, I recommend 33% or more of the lesson).

Stage Two, Orientation: The Gap of Wonder

My Lord, said I, let’s hurry then and go!

I’m not as weary as I was before

Dante, Purgatorio VI, 49

Next, having ascertained the student’s readiness, the teacher leads the student to a gap. In other words, she raises a question in his mind, sometimes by asking one (ie what would happen if…?), sometimes by making a promise (by the end of this lesson, you will be able to…), sometimes by telling a story or anecdote that surprises the students (“when the Rabbit actually took a watch out of its waistcoat pocket…”).

Stage Three, Presentation: Into the Gap

It is the nature of the word to reveal itself and to incarnate itself… Dorothy Sayers, The Mind of the Maker p111

In the third stage, the teacher enters the gap with her students by presenting types of the logos, especially illustrations and examples. She gathers or develops these prior to the learning situation in order to embody the logos. She thinks about the types with her students, entering into their uncertainty and sharing in their discoveries. Here are some types:

If the logos is an idea, such as “you should share” or “Mankind is the image of God,” the type might be a fable, fairy tale, myth, analogy, historical event, Bible story, or experience from the students’ lives.

If the logos is a mathematical or material truth, such as 3+2=5 or maple leaves have serrated edges, the teacher presents examples, such as a few real maple leaves⁵ or three plastic bears beside two plastic bears which combine to become five plastic bears.

If the logos is a skill or action, such as holding a bow (a physical skill) or generating a simile (an intellectual skill), the teacher provides examples for the student to imitate.

Whatever the logos, the teacher’s task is to find or generate types and to present them to the student in as vivid and clear a manner as possible in order to draw the student’s attention to the types (vivid and clear examples do a better job of revealing the glory of the logos than the dull and cloudy and students are naturally drawn to glories).

Stage Four, Contemplation: The Great Puzzle

“Dear, dear! How queer everything is today! And yesterday things went on just as usual. I wonder if I’ve been changed in the night? Let me think: was I the same when I got up this morning? I almost think I can remember feeling a little different. But if I’m not the same, the next question is, Who in the world am I? Ah, that’s the great puzzle!”

Alice in Wonderland, p. 12

Attentiveness is the underlying virtue of all learning, and people tend to pay better attention when they compare things with each other. In the fourth stage, the teacher guides her students to compare the types with each other.

Attending to this stage helps overcome our tendency to draw hasty conclusions as well as our eagerness to set aside a lesson before we reach its goal. But the main purpose of the comparison stage is to move the student from types to logos.

In a sense, this is the easiest stage for the teacher. We compare long before we are conscious of doing so, so the questions tend to come quickly and easily: How is this type like that one? How are they different? Is there more or less? Which is a better or worse instance? What is common to them all? What is specific to one or only a few? What is essential and what is accidental?

These identifications are among the most essential activities of the thoughtful person, we can see that the contemplation stage may well be the activity that best trains students in the most essential activities of reasoning, such as attentive noting, inference, deduction, analogical reasoning, discernment, etc.

A teacher might ask a preschool child, “When I combined three bears with two bears, how many were in the new group? What about when I combined three apples with two apples? What was the same both times? What was different?” Another teacher might ask her students to compare the way Vronsky treated his horse with the way he treated Anna Karenina: “What was the same? Different? Did Vronsky’s treatment of each have any effects common to both?” The logos is, as it were, hidden in the types, and it is by asking such questions that we coax it out.

Attentiveness is the underlying virtue of all learning, and people tend to pay better attention when they compare things with each other.

Stage Five, Illumination:

Then came, at a predetermined moment,

a moment in time and out of time.

TS Eliot

As the teacher guides her students to compare the types, something magical (really, it is miraculous) begins to happen: the logos that has been, as it were, hidden in the types begins to emerge in the students’ minds (like a stowaway?).

We call this stage illumination, the moment when the student says, “I get it!⁶,” when the joy of learning laughs because learning has occurred, when the light bulbs go on.⁷

In the scriptures, Our Lord tells us that “one is your teacher, Christ” (Matthew 23:10) which seems a bit odd. But at this moment, the moment every other moment serves, our Lord’s words become to the teacher. Because the teachers’ role when she senses that The Moment is coming is to withdraw and simply to wait prayerfully on the Lord to do what only He can do.

This moment of illumination is the goal of the entire lesson, the reason for every element and stage, the motivation for every action. Yet it is always a gift, one we can prepare for, bear witness to, and pray for, but not one we can give.

Stage 6, Re-presentation:

When the writer’s Idea is… incarnate… then, and only then, can his Power work on the world. A book has no influence till somebody can read it.”

Dorothy Sayers, The Mind of the Maker, p. 111

The student illumined by a logos is changed by the experience. As a result, the teacher’s role changes. Now she provides a means for the student to re-present using his own resources the logos he has apprehended.

In most lessons, the teacher will ask her student to express the logos: the moral of the story, the steps of an algorithm, the insight gained about, e.g., Achilles’ motivations. Often, she will instruct him to apply the logos in math exercises, an essay, a project, or life. Sometimes, students should combine lessons with other students. For example, the violin student who has mastered a new technique can perform it with a quartet.

Stage 7, Recognition: Crowning

“I crown and miter you lord of yourself.”

Vergil to Dante. Purgatorio XXVII, p. 142

Once the student has embodied the logos learned, he has attained a micro-mastery—a little bit of authority. Now, the teacher’s role is to crown him, that is, to recognize that authority and set the student free in a proportionate and appropriate way that acknowledges he has taken one more step on the road to self-governance, his domain has expanded by a little bit, and he is becoming a free person.

Student’s Perspective

While in the preceding section we described the seven stages from the teacher’s perspective, we included the student’s experience simply because we cannot consider the teacher’s work without thinking about what the teacher is working on. If there is no student there is no teacher.

Nevertheless, the teacher needs to understand the student’s journey from the student’s perspective as well. It is surprisingly easy for us as teachers to plough ahead up the mountain and fail to notice when one of our flock has wandered away or fallen off a cliff. Let us therefore consider the student’s perspective.

 But at this moment, the moment every other moment serves, our Lord’s words become to the teacher

Well designed types, such as stories, analogies, examples, and paintings, attract students because they provide hope and radiate the glory that draws the soul to every good thing.

Stage Six, Re-presention: A New Song

“Once the idea has entered into other minds, it will tend to reincarnate itself there with ever-increasing Energy and ever-increasing Power.” Dorothy Sayers, The Mind of the Maker, p. 111

Once the student has been illumined, he is ready to show what he has seen. Now, he can re-present the logos his teacher presented to him. Using the arts of expression he mastered in previous lessons (such as sentences, essays, reports, models, etc.), he “re-incarnates” what was incarnated for him, sometimes expressing himself and sometimes applying the logos.

When he does so, his teacher can confirm that he has been illumined and has “grasped” the logos. In addition, by embodying what he has learned, he secures his grasp on the logos and makes it stick.

Stage Seven, Recognition: Ruling His Domain

Every word… will be accounted for at the day of judgment because the word itself has power to bring to judgment.

Sayers, The Mind of the Maker, p. 111

Knowledge confers authority on its possessor, and the greater the knowledge gained, the greater the true authority the knower attains. Consequently, when the teacher has confirmed that her student can embody the idea or skill, she sets him free to rule the domain he has mastered, be it never so humble or so great. Older students who have been taught mimetically for many years will have gained extensive authority, while students who have learned little will have little authority.

The student becomes master who can exercise his authority in many ways, including play, applying on his own what he learned in other areas, and using the knowledge gained to make something else. However, the teacher should be careful not to determine how the newly equipped master will exercise his authority⁸ as this would undercut it and reduce him to the level of a servant precisely where and when he ought to be master. For example, when a teacher intervenes in her students’ play, she often robs them of their sense that what he is doing is in fact play. Students find this deeply discouraging, and many quit playing when it happens. Unfortunately, this disrupts their intuitive efforts to self-reinforce what they have learned.

At the same time, we need to remember that the authority and freedom attained in any given lesson are a micro-freedom. In each case, your student has mastered the lesson taught, not the whole art or science, not to mention the world or the people around him or even himself. Yet it is to rule all these things in appropriate ways that we are teaching him.

Furthermore, some teachers may feel irresponsible when they let their student decide how he will exercise his authority. After all, he might not exercise it at all. They need not worry; they teach mimetically! When they introduce the next lesson, they will begin with the first stage, bringing to their students’ awareness what they will need to know for that journey. To switch metaphors, each lesson becomes a link in a chain. When the next link is added, it strengthens those previously acquired.

Time and space prevent me from dwelling on the glories of mimetic teaching, so I hope something of its beauty, practicality, and effectiveness has peeked through my words.⁹

Teaching in the form of Christ is beautiful, practical, and effective. It aligns with the seven-stage pilgrimage of the soul as it is illumined by the Holy Spirit and gives a true crown of authority, one gained not by grasping for equality with God or power over men but by knowledge and self-control (Phil. 2 and I Peter 1).

The glory of mimetic teaching is teaching in the form of Christ, imitating His person as the incarnate Word and imitating His manner of teaching in the creation, the types of the Old Testament, and the parables of the New.

Thus mimetic teaching fulfills the aspirations of the Christian classical educator by bringing glory to God while cultivating wisdom and virtue in our students.

Appendix:

Seven Lessons

Seven logoi that govern teaching:

1. The success of a lesson depends on the teacher’s apprehension of the logos, her ability to embody the logos in types, and her readiness to guide the student to perceive the logos in the types.

2. To move from types to a logos, students pay attention and make comparisons.

3. Students can only learn what they are ready to learn, so effective teachers determine whether their students are ready to learn.

4. The minds of students are aroused to learn when they encounter a gap of wonder, one that is not so big as to be unbridgeable nor so small as to be uninteresting.

5. Most properly speaking, learning is the moment of illumination, which is therefore the goal of any lesson. This moment is always a miracle and cannot be forced.

6. Once the student has been illumined, he can re-present, express, and apply what he has learned in his own manner because he has become an authority on the given logos.

7. The student should be recognized and honored in fitting ways for the authority gained.

Notes