he
College of St. Justin Martyr, as servant to the universal Church’s
mission “to restore all things in Christ,” seeks to effect a
rebirth in
Catholic education. This is the first effort since the Second Vatican
Council to establish a thoroughly orthodox Catholic liberal arts college
that is centered on the daily offering of the traditional Latin Mass.
It is
with great joy, ardor, and hope, therefore, that our College sets out
to
provide a classical liberal education for young men and women.
Why is there a need for the College of St. Justin Martyr? Ours is an age suffering from the triple assault of skepticism, relativism, and naturalism. The Church of Christ herself is buffeted by the winds of unbelief without and of dissent within. From where else, then, will the rebirth of Catholic culture and education come, if not from the reaffirmation of the timeless truths of reason and of faith, by those who gladly submit their will and intellect to Christ and His Church? A cultivated human intellect, within the limits of the faith that perfects it, is surely the solid basis of this reaffirmation.
The College of St. Justin Martyr, as a center of Catholic educational and social renewal, will till the soil of the human intellect through the restoration of classical learning in historical development. In what follows, we shall set forth the aims, principles, and character of the College, and describe in general outline our curriculum and method of instruction.
According as the College of St. Justin Martyr is a classical liberal arts
college, its highest aspirations are epitomized in St. Paul’s proclamation
that “our conversation is in Heaven” (nostra conversatio in cœlis
est). This word conversatio, from St. Jerome’s Vulgate, implies
not only discourse but also intimate acquaintance with another. Hence,
St. Paul is urging us to a discourse, and indeed a union, with Eternal
Reason, after Whom man is a created image. Such a discourse is possible
because God within Himself has spoken first in a divine conversatio
from all eternity through the glorious procession of the Word, the Second
Person of the Holy Trinity, Christ Jesus, the true light which enlightens
every man.
For the human spirit, the discourse with God is the summit of conversatio. From the dawn of Christianity, this conversatio has been reached in private and public prayer, the latter typically consisting in the communal, orderly, and hierarchical character of the sacred liturgy of the Church of the Word Incarnate, the Catholic Church. The liturgy of the Church offers public worship to God the Father through the Son in the Holy Spirit, a worship in spirit and in truth worthy of a free, social, and rational creature. Because God is the object of worship, the liturgy calls forth from man the highest art, science, and human action. And though the whole created universe is a hymn to God the Creator, the liturgical service of man is the highest expression of nature’s homage.
For man was made to participate in divine things in a special way and, finally, in the eternal liturgy of Heaven itself, by the grace and charity of Jesus Christ.
The College of St. Justin Martyr, then, has as its ultimate end the actual participation of the human person in this conversatio with Heaven. Our College will endeavor to prepare the mind and body of its students for a full, active, and fruitful participation in the liturgy of Holy Church. This is especially the case in regard to the Eucharistic Sacrifice, which is, as the Second Vatican Council teaches, the summit and fount of Christian life. As a molder of souls and a school for grace, the sacred liturgy is itself an incomparable mode of education.
The immediate end of the College consists precisely in the education of the human person with a view to divine service, the liturgical conversatio. This means that the College must attend in its general organization, and specifically in its curriculum, to the perfection of man both from the natural and supernatural standpoints. Our patron, St. Justin Martyr, exemplified the concourse of natural reason and supernatural faith: Christian convert of the second century and student of the Logos-theology of St. John at Ephesus; philosopher, apologist, and founder of a Christian school in Rome; a great source of the early liturgy; and martyr for the Catholic Faith. St. Justin put into practice the rational exhortation of St. Peter: “Always be ready to give an explanation to anyone who asks you for a reason for your hope.” Thus, the College of St. Justin Martyr seeks to perfect the natural instrument of learning, the human mind, so that it may profit from a pursuit of knowledge, human and divine, arriving ultimately at that wisdom with which, by comparison, all gold is accounted a little sand: “For God loves nothing so much as the man who lives with wisdom” (Wisdom 7:28).
The College of St. Justin Martyr has grounded its educational system upon
the traditional liberal arts whose roots can be traced back through St.Thomas
Aquinas and St. Augustine to the ancient Greek philosophers, particularly
Plato and Aristotle. Cassiodorus, a sixth century monk who wrote a book
on the seven liberal arts, cited the following verse from
Proverbs to establish the Divine Mind as the ultimate source of these
arts: “Wisdom has built herself a house; she has set up her seven
pillars.” Another monk, Hugh of St. Victor, six hundred years after
Cassiodorus, wrote concerning the seven liberal arts: “They are,
as it were, the best instruments and the best beginnings, by which the
way is prepared in the
mind for the full knowledge of philosophical truth. Hence they are called
the trivium and quadrivium, since by these roads, so to speak, the lively
mind may enter the secret places of wisdom.”
In the College of St. Justin Martyr we will study the traditional liberal arts by recourse to the greatest books in each of these seven fields of study. As such, the College will belong to the family of Great Books colleges of contemporary educational vintage. And yet, the College of St. Justin Martyr seeks to improve upon the Great Books program by a greater fidelity to the classical liberal arts of the trivium (grammar, logic, rhetoric) and quadrivium (arithmetic, geometry, music, astronomy), while incorporating authentic historical development of these disciplines. These two sets of arts, verbal (trivium) and mathematical (quadrivium), form the heart of our curriculum. Supplementing this core will be studies in natural history and natural science, human and cultural history (e.g., literature and art history), philosophy, and the Book of Books, Holy Scripture. The curriculum will be a fixed one for all students; in other words, there will be neither majors nor electives. For it is a tenet of the College that there is a basic and objective canon that constitutes the essential education of the human person.
At the foundation of all human learning, as the ancients understood well,
is the word. St. Augustine and St. Thomas marveled at analogies between
the created intellect—which cannot think without words—and the Trinity.
The first line of St John’s Gospel, “In the beginning was the Word,” teaches
us that the Divine Mind expresses itself in the Word, that divine conversatio
of which we have spoken. Similarly, the human mind first expresses itself
and its knowledge through the mental word or concept. Afterwards, the
human mind communicates in the spoken word, upon which the written word
depends. Indeed, upon these three forms of discourse—mental, linguistic,
written—rests the whole edifice of human and divine science. Hence, we
find the rationale for the three foundational arts of logic, grammar,
and rhetoric. Logic studies the discourse of the mind in the search for
truth, grammar studies the discourse of speech as a structure of signs,
and rhetoric the modes of expression that are pleasing and persuasive,
the word properly adorned.
Accordingly, the College of St. Justin Martyr lays special emphasis on language and logic. Latin, the language of the Western Church, her liturgy, and the Book of Books, will be studied with a view to reading, writing, and speaking proficiency. In addition, Greek will be studied because it is one of the original languages of Scripture, and also for the reading of the Church Fathers and intellectual sources of Western Civilization. Logic, insofar as it is concerned with reasoning rightly in matters scientific, is the method of every science. When the nature of discourse, therefore, is investigated and understood by the verbal arts, participation in the sacred liturgy and penetration of the revealed word, which forms the instructional part of the Mass, are greatly enhanced.
With training in the verbal arts, the student is outfitted with rational
tools and procedures that will equip him to engage mathematical and natural
science. These latter belong to the sphere of speculative inquiry into
the order of the natural world. Mathematics explores the realm of quantity
according as it is discrete (arithmetic) or continuous (geometry). The
burden of natural science is to unfold the substantial principles of physical
reality and the mysteries of matter and change. The historical growth
of mathematics and natural science into the modern and contemporary periods,
and the challenges and complementarity between ancient and modern speculative
thought, will be of particular interest to the culture of education fostered
by the College.
The study of music, traditionally a mathematical art, will be both theoretical and practical. Cassiodorus taught that music is “the discipline which treats of numbers in their relation to those things which are found in sounds.” Students will undertake the actual practice of singing sacred music, especially Gregorian chant. Classical, modern, and contemporary music will be studied as well. The mathematical arts and natural science usher the student into the wonders of the musical system of the universe, a symbolic universe of ratios and harmonies, of laws of motion and of light that suggest a cosmic liturgy and point to the Divine Art. Following this path, the student comes to see the splendor and provident order of creation. Dear to the pedagogy of the College, then, will be the contemplation of the highest things through beauty, in contrast with the prevailing functionalism in modern culture.
In addition to the seven traditional liberal arts, the studies of human
and cultural history and of Scripture are integral to the curriculum.
To understand the great ideas as they are embedded in the great books,
we must draw upon the context of history. Just as we understand a particular
law or a line of Scripture through the context in which we find it, so
we understand better these things and all else by the yet wider context
of time and place and cultural ambience. History, moreover, is the theatre
of divine providence. And Scripture is the history of redemption and salvation.
The study of Holy Scripture will be treated from the viewpoint of the
liberal arts and of history. Because the Word of God is transmitted according
to our humanity and mode of communication, one ought first to seek a familiarity
with the narrative of the Bible, as well as with its language and history,
before attempting to extract theological meanings from it. Moreover, since
it is not really possible to study theology without first having acquired
mastery of the liberal arts and philosophy, the College will leave a systematic
theological treatment of Scripture to a higher level of study.
From a natural standpoint, the apex of the curriculum will be reached when the student arrives at the introduction to classical metaphysics and ethics (moral and political philosophy). By set purpose, the College will not undertake an in-depth exploration of these disciplines. Having in a general way examined certain key classical themes of higher speculative and practical philosophy, the College will direct and encourage the student to further investigations in these fields. Thus while the supremacy and regulative nature of metaphysics as the science of being will be given its due, the primary intention of the College remains the cultivation of natural reason in its capacity for reasoning well, and therefore as a fitting instrument for any science worthy of the name, including theology.
In order to till the soil of human reason effectively, students must be
stimulated to think for themselves and to think rightly. To this end we
have established the tutorial as the primary mode of instruction. The
tutorial aims at right reason and knowledge through class discussion on
a text where the teacher guides his students by way of the Socratic method.
As an auxiliary mode of instruction, the seminar will be used to acquaint
students with a variety of great books in a variety of fields from antiquity
to the contemporary period. The purpose of the seminar is to allow for
the maximum of student direction of the discussion so that the students
may acquire and exercise dialectical skills. Thus, in the seminar, the
proportioned expression of justified opinion is the aim. Besides the seminar
and tutorial, the lecture mode of teaching will be employed in appropriate
areas of study, such as history, to develop the students’ docility and
ability to follow a train of argumentation.
As an institution of liberal education, the College of St. Justin Martyr
aspires to the great conversation of the western and Catholic tradition
of institutional learning, beginning with the Platonic Academy, rising
to the heights of the medieval university, and engaging the insights and
conflicts of the modern schools. We seek no nostalgic return to some golden
age. But rather, as modern men, we wish to leaven the current conversation
with the heavenly conversatio between God and man, which is the
culmination of man’s perennial upward striving for the Good, the True,
and the Beautiful. For the student, the practical effect of this can only
mean an expansion, elevation, and fortification of his mind, according
to true principles, for life in the realms of the professions, public
service, the Church, and the family. Thus a liberal education at once
satisfies both the upper reaches of the intellect and the practical demands
of life in the modern world.
In the spirit of maternal solicitude, the College wishes to be the womb of a rational and moral freedom as befits the liberally educated man. As the axis of the collegiate community, the Liturgy and the Sacraments will lead the student to a learned and saintly life. The harmony and respective rights of faith and reason will be celebrated and, following St. Paul into Athens, an authentic Christian humanism unfolded. For in the person of St. Paul himself, the children of Israel and the children of reason, the Greeks, embraced under the imperium of Christ. The supreme lights of our College, therefore, must be in the first place the Catholic Faith of the Church of Christ, the divinely guaranteed authority of her Supreme Pontiff and Magisterium, Holy Scripture, the doctors of the Church, in particular, St. Augustine and St. Thomas Aquinas, and the philosophia perennis of the history of human thought. In the words of the Christmas liturgy, we proclaim: O Jesu! of the Virgin born, unceasing glory be to thee; and to the Father infinite, and Holy Spirit eternally. Amen.”
In sum, the College of St. Justin Martyr happily belongs to the great liturgical procession to the New Jerusalem of the pilgrim Catholic Church, the priestly People of God and Mystical Body of Christ. May the Seat of Wisdom, Mary Most Holy, St. John the Evangelist, and St. Justin Martyr intercede for us and for our benefactors before the throne of the Lamb.
