Catholic Liberal Arts

Academic Life: the Pursuit of Truth

Surely it is very intelligible to say . . . that Liberal Education, viewed in itself, is simply the  cultivation of the intellect, as such, and its object is nothing more or less than intellectual  excellence. . . . To open the mind, to correct it, to refine it, to enable it to know, and to digest, master, rule, and use its knowledge, to give it power over its own faculties, application, flexibility,  method, critical exactness, sagacity, resource, address, eloquent expression, is an object as  intelligible . . . as the cultivation of virtue.
-Blessed John Henry Newman, The Idea of a University
 
 

To all of you I say: bear witness to hope. Nourish your witness with prayer. Account for the hope  that characterizes your lives (cf. 1 Pet 3:15) by living the truth which you propose to your  students. Help them to know and love the One you have encountered, whose truth and goodness  you have experienced with joy. With Saint Augustine, let us say: “we who speak and you who  listen acknowledge ourselves as fellow disciples of a single teacher” (Sermons, 23:2).
- Pope Benedict XVIth, Address to Catholic Educators (2008)

The study of philosophy does not mean to learn what others have thought but to learn what is the  truth of things.
-St. Thomas Aquinas, Commentaria in Aristotelis De Caelo et mundo
 
 
Through the Catholic liberal arts education offered at the College of Saint Mary Magdalen,  we seek to perfect the intellect of each of our students, understanding the well-formed intellect to be an essential part of the integrated human person.  To achieve the flourishing of such a person, those charged with the intellectual development of our students cooperate with those at the College who would call our students to lives of moral virtue, holiness, and spiritual fervor, without compromising the intellectual ends to which the institution is primarily ordered.  
 
At the same time, affirming Pope Benedict’s observation that “first and foremost every Catholic educational institution is a place to encounter the living God who in Jesus Christ reveals his transforming love and truth,” we seek—through our Program of Studies—to create the conditions within the hearts and minds of our students for such an encounter.
 
  Six Characteristics of the Education We Offer
 
(1) We employ primary texts as the means to acquire wisdom.
At the College we engage in the close reading of primary texts—great books, poetry, plays, important essays and articles, Sacred Scripture, Church documents, as well as significant artistic and musical works—that are recognized as historically and philosophically important. Our respect for the remarkable achievement that is Western Civilization, prompts us to study and communicate to future generations some of the most unique and important of the West’s contributions to humanity.
 
(2) We examine the texts we read and our own experiences through dialogue.
Cultivating a sense of wonder in ourselves and our students, we teach primarily through questioning and dialogue, beginning with a careful consideration of common and inherited opinions, the lenses through which we understand our lives and through which we read the texts at hand.  While acknowledging the value of the experience each participant brings to our inquiry, we recognize the objective nature of truth, and the opportunity a liberal education affords for the evaluation of the ways we see the world and live within it.
 
(3) Created and living within time, we seek wisdom that is at once transcendent and historical.
While pursuing “the truth of things,” we tether the texts we read within history.  Just as we reject the duality of mind and body, so we seek to overcome the dichotomy between philosophy and history, which would allow students to read works without any understanding of the historical context in which they were created and first received.  While repudiating any form of historicism that would occlude our access to the transcendent, we recognize that the authors whose works we read inhabited a liminal state, reaching out toward universals while living within the flux of time.
 
(4) We seek the universal within the particular.
Through these primary texts, we strive to clarify the universal principles and experiences that structure all of reality—seeking out “being” within the realm of “becoming”—recognizing that nature and culture reveal their secrets only to those who are willing to discipline themselves for the journey toward truth and who make wisdom their highest aim.  
 
(5) Our inquiry exhibits the integration of Faith and Reason.
We read closely both the Book of Nature and the Book of Revelation, not in opposition to one another but as complementary sources of truth.  We undertake a sustained philosophical inquiry using faith and reason (fides et ratio), what the Venerable John Paul II called the “two wings on which the human spirit rises to the contemplation of truth,” taking up and pursuing unrelentingly the perennial and sapiential questions such as “Who am I?,” “Is there a God?,” “Is there life after death?,” “How shall we live?” and “What does it mean to be human?”
 
(6) Our inquiry is ordered toward human flourishing.
Observing the relationships that structure reality and the nature of things, we seek to build a foundation for the good life properly constituted by and ordered toward the Good, the True, and the Beautiful.
 
Four Ways to Understand our Program of Studies:
 
As the fruit of thirty-six years of development, the integrated liberal arts curriculum at the College of Saint Mary Magdalen may be properly apprehended from four interrelated perspectives:   (1) as a study of the great books and artistic works that have shaped the mind of the West, understood within the unfolding of salvation history, (2) as a contemporary recovery of the seven liberal arts (i.e., the traditional trivium and quadrivium) recognized as the means to the highest disciplines: theology and philosophy,  (3) as an exploration and extension of the Catholic humanistic tradition, and  (4) as a program of study infused by the example of St. Thomas Aquinas, whom we follow in taking up and considering a variety of views, recognizing that all learning is fundamentally dialogical.
 
Listening closely to the words of our Holy Father, St. Thomas Aquinas, and Blessed John Henry Newman, we seek knowledge of the Truth and the perfection of the intellect as part of the fully integrated human person, while following Christ joyfully and with hope.