California's own College of Light
By Marc Sidwell
MAY, 2007 (www.catholicherald.co.uk)
Richard Dawkins believes that Christianity is an intellectual vacancy.
That's probably because he has never visited the astonishing Thomas
Aquinas College, says Marc Sidwell.
"I look up now, past a rounded tree which quivers with bird-life,
and I see a few of the students. Once again, it's a kind of shock
to gaze upon them."
It is unfashionable to acknowledge that good ideas come from America.
Thirty years ago Christopher Derrick discovered Thomas Aquinas College
in Southern California, and could not conceal his wonder. Here was
a community of learning unlike anything left in Europe. He shared
his delight in Escape from Scepticism: Liberal Education as if Truth
Mattered. Stumbling on his account last year while researching a
new history of liberal education, I, too, was exhilarated. The decades
have changed nothing; this college is as important as ever.
Thomas Aquinas College is a Great Books school. Its students engage
directly with the profound thinkers that define Western civilisation:
St. Thomas Aquinas, Dante, Euclid, Plato and Shakespeare, to name
only a few. Classes employ the Socratic method of dialogue. The
curriculum is stretching, yet not impossibly demanding. Most important
of all, the college is centered on the faculty's profession of Catholic
faith. Beginning in wonder, the course aims at wisdom.
"What struck me first was the extreme happiness of the students,"
wrote Derrick. That still appears to hold true. The discovery of
intellectual power in the context of an intellectually rigorous
faith looks far more enjoyable than the usual campus free-for-all.
For what Thomas Aquinas College rejects is the easy relativism that
Pope Benedict XVI has so roundly denounced. Assured of the existence
of truth, the mind is freed to engage with the great conversation
of the Western mind.
Thomas Aquinas College is a modern exemplar of a great tradition.
Liberal education stretches back to the birth of our civlisation-a
golden thread of intellectual freedom. It begins in 5th century
Athens, as the education due to a free man. Faith and reason intertwined
in the Catholic Church, carrying our civilisation forward after
the fall of Rome. Now men spoke of universal freedom and therefore
a universal education. Preserved in the Benedictine orders, transmitted
by schoolmaster-priests, it was the Christian liberal educators
who kept the life of the mind alive through centuries of uncertainty
and civil strife.
It is extraordinary that the vital educational role of the Church
is now so underappreciated. Only last year, suspicion of Catholic
schools was common in the Press even as a survey demonstrated their
above-average standards and their excellent work towards producing
well-rounded future citizens.
Such excellence should come as no surprise. St. Thomas Aquinas,
the doctor angelicus, is proof of the high value Catholicism has
always placed upon reasoned enquiry into creation. Yet the sceptics
like Richard Dawkins continue to sneer at Christianity as an intellectual
vacancy. They misquote Tertullian as "I believe because it
is absurd" and do not know St. Anselm of Canterbury's Credo
ut intelligam. ("I believe in order to understand").
Recently, this teaching has been reaffirmed. Pope John Paul II
published Fides et Ratio in 1998, which opens with a ringing endorsement:
"Faith and reason are like two wings on which the human spirit
rises to the contemplation of truth."
Only last year His Holiness Benedict XVI used his Regensburg address
to say that "the encounter between the biblical message and
Greek thought did not happen by chance."
Even while Rome speaks, the ideal of a liberal education is almost
lost from British discourse. Thirty years after Christopher Derrick's
epiphany in Santa Paula, it seems little has changed at home. Instead,
the exchange runs the other way. Two British students and one Irish
citizen are currently enjoying the Californian sun, not the first
to accept the 6000-mile journey as the price of an education no
longer available at home.
Today, Thomas Aquinas College is more confident than ever. For
30 years, its graduates have gone out into the world and proven
their ability to excel in all fields. One American alumnus runs
a network of pre-schools in London. When Christopher Derrick visited,
only six years after its founding, there were 33 students. Today,
there are ten times as many, and a growing waiting list. For the
last three years, the college has been in the top 10 conservative
colleges in America.
"The human mind is ordered to truth," says college president,
Dr. Thomas E. Dillon, who was a member of the teaching faculty at
the time of Derrick's original visit. He notes the Vatican's recent
emphasis on this teaching and adds: "If anything, the mission
and character of Thomas Aquinas College is more relevant now than
it was in 1977."
A liberal education is not exclusively a Catholic prerogative.
Protestant and secular schools all do fine work in this great tradition-again,
now largely in America. Yet it remains true that the Catholic Church
has played the greatest role, and is most likely to be in the vanguard
of any revival. To me, an Anglican, it seems tragic that Britain,
once the last bulwark of liberal education, should choose to neglect
its heritage.
Perhaps foolishly, I find myself inspired by the great unbuilt
British college, the College of Light. In 1641 Jan Comenius was
invited to London by the Long Parliament to establish the Collegium
Lucis: the last moment when scientific thought and Christian faith
might have united in a modern British institution. Civil war intervened,
and the Royal Society was established instead, without Comenius's
(admittedly heterodox) faith.
America, they say, is always a few decades ahead. That makes it
high time for Britain to catch up with the principles of Thomas
Aquinas College. Meanwhile, the Californians join Pope Benedict
in his prayer on the recent feast of St. Thomas Aquinas: "Let
us pray that Christians, especially those who work in an academic
and cultural context, are able to express the reasonableness of
their faith and witness to it in a dialogue inspired by love."
Marc Sidwell is a Research Fellow of the New Culture Forum and
a freelance author. He writes articles on liberal education for
the Social Affairs Unit and is currently editing a liberal education
reader from Plato to the present day.
(This article first appeared in the May 2007 issue of The Catholic
Herald of London. www.catholicherald.co.uk)
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