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The model of the College is an ordination of all learning to theological wisdom. This has been called liberal education—a kind of education that is sought not for some special purpose, not for practical ends, finally, but that man might know how things are, that he might be fully a man. A program of liberal education traditionally consisted in the liberal arts, then the sciences, and finally philosophy. The liberal arts came to be known as the trivium—grammar, logic, and rhetoric. The quadrivium is made up of the mathematical sciences, and then introduces the student to an ordered universe, as in cosmology, or even a moral order, as in music. These studies were considered preliminary, the little ways into philosophy and ultimately into theology. St. Augustine had in mind these preliminary studies when he called upon Greek learning to elevate the mind so as to participate more fully in theological wisdom. St. Anselm, too, had them in mind when he spoke about fides quaerem intellectum. “Faith seeking understanding” involved turning to the handmaidens—the liberal arts and sciences—and bringing them together to help in the work of theology. Historically, the beginning of university life came from the Catholic faith and from theology. Oxford, Cambridge, Paris, Salamanca, Bologna—all the universities that sprung up in the Middle Ages came about from the desire that the Christian had for his faith to seek understanding. All of the disciplines were brought together into these centers of learning, and out of those centers came all of the universities that followed. There was a great intellectual culture that was present in Christendom and shaped that world. With the dawn of the Enlightenment in Europe, a great shift took place in philosophy and science, beginning in the 17th century with Descartes who started education off in a new direction. The older sense of education was that one could not arrive at wisdom about things if one did not master the liberal arts and sciences. Descartes, however, started philosophy from scratch saying, as it were, I am going to reject everything that I ever learned before, or that we have ever learned before as a civilization and a culture, and start anew. Then he began, of course, looking for one method that would apply to everything, and started with the famous cogito ergo sum—I think, therefore I am—as the very first principle of all knowledge. When Descartes did that, he trapped himself in the mind. Before, philosophy had been understood as talking about things, about reality. From Descartes on, though, all philosophy started not with things, but with ideas. Our late Holy Father, Pope John Paul II, called this the beginning of the “philosophy of consciousness,” contrasting it with the “philosophy of existence,” of which St. Thomas and Aristotle are the masters. The “philosophy of existence” starts with things, not with ideas, and leads ultimately to ipsum esse subsistens—subsisting being itself, which is God. The “philosophy of consciousness,” on the other hand, begins in the mind, never leaves the mind, and ends up in an absolute subjectivism. Man becomes everything and the measure of all things. With this, the traditional “philosophy of being” vanished; within 150 years of Descartes, at about 1800, there was nothing left of Christian intellectual culture in Europe. That is why Pope Leo the XIII, towards the end of the 19th century, urged that Catholic education return to St. Thomas and that tradition that roots itself not in ideas but in things. Moreover, he urged Catholics to go back to all those disciplines that are necessary to acquire some measure of wisdom. There was, therefore, a kind of Thomistic revival that took place largely in the first half of the 20th century. Sadly enough, it was so tainted with modern thought that St. Thomas was never used as St. Thomas. Instead, a kind of neo-Thomism came along in which, one did not really go to Thomas; one used Thomistic language, but only captured modern thoughts. It was not long, therefore, before Thomism in this sense began to fall apart. We who were teachers in Catholic colleges and universities were aware of what was happening; we could see things were eroding badly. In the late 1960s, it got to a point of collapse. It was then that we launched the idea of Thomas Aquinas College. We thought that if we were going to do it, we ought to do it right. Therefore, we would not just try to give students an exposure to St. Thomas, or an exposure to Aristotle, but we would actually try to create within them those intellectual virtues, those habits that are fundamental to all right thinking. Of course, the only way one can attain these virtues is to actually practice them, not just read about them, but to actually acquire them and make them part of oneself. It would be necessary, therefore, to go back to the fundamental things without skipping over, without short-cutting. If, for example, one’s father is a rocket scientist, it is possible that one can learn the latest technique from him without having to go back and invent the wheel, as it were. But if one’s father is just and temperate and prudent and so on, one cannot just pick up from where he left off. One has to go through the whole experience of learning those virtues oneself, learning to be temperate, learning to be courageous, learning to be just, learning to be prudent. Liberal education is like that. One must go back to the very beginnings and do the very same things that Aristotle did, that St. Thomas did, that St. Augustine did. If one does not do those things, one simply has not put education on a firm foundation. Our ambitions were to revive something of the Christian intellectual culture that once flourished in Europe, and as we look at our students, I think we can say the dream has happened. I think the results have even exceeded our expectations.
-- Qtrly Newsletter, Winter 2006 |
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