worship of God worthy of a rational creature created in His image and likeness calls for the cultivation of human reason. For since grace perfects nature, Catholic tradition has always been obliged to recognize the fostering and tutelage of human nature as a preamble of faith.

In accordance with the intellectual tradition of the Catholic Church, the College of St. Justin Martyr reaffirms the validity of rational investigation and the access of reason to certain and universal knowledge concerning God, man, and nature. The sure principles of right reason achieved through the classical canon of liberal arts constitute the natural foundation of true philosophy, theology, religious and professional life.

We take as evident that a college must have an end and principle of unity, if it is to be an intelligible enterprise. Accordingly, the proximate end which unifies the whole of our College and its curriculum, as an expression of liberal education, is right reason (recta ratio).

As a fundamental human desideratum, rectitude of mind or spirit has deep roots in the Hebrew, Greek, and Roman cultural sources of our Western Civilization and way of education. "A right spirit renew in my innermost being," implores the Psalmist (50), "because our Lord God is upright" (rectus) (91). Plato taught that eros and opinion could be rectified by a philosophical way of life. And St. Thomas Aquinas, following Aristotle, made right reason synonymous with science, the rational creature's greatest natural possession. Indeed, right reason is an inescapable requirement of our human nature and figures in any arena of serious and coherent reflection. For at its most basic, right reason is any orderly and valid thought leading to knowledge. As such, it is epitomized by philosophy or scientific inquiry. So whether we are discussing planets or poetry, we must reason rightly, that is, invoke a science proportionate to the subject matter under consideration.

Now right reason, by dint of being right, is not only the habit of proceeding correctly in our scientific thinking, it is also the habit of science itself. With the expression "habit of science" we refer to a virtue inhering in the intellect that consists in the very content of knowledge about this or that subject matter. In short, reason is right precisely so long as it both proceeds well, and in the process attains its object, which is science or knowledge. Hence right reason at the same time is perfective of the individual human subject and yields an objective content which is universally true.

The possibility of the aim and the validity of objective reason has never before been held in such disrepute in the West, which as a civilization did more than any other to cultivate the rational faculty of man. This is owing, ironically, to an age which boasted of its rationality (viz., the Age of Reason), but led the modern mind to a disastrous choice between a skeptical and pragmatic rationalism, on the one hand, and a romantic sentimentalism in reaction, on the other. Our College curriculum will, therefore, be a grammar in aid of the recovery of a Christian humanism, and the vindication of an authentic rational culture through a proper understanding of the classical and perennial scheme of liberal arts education. Through this the student will be instructed not only to exercise reason critically, but also to grasp aright the knowledge and truths obtaining in each liberal discipline, which together constitute the foundation of human wisdom. Hence, our educational concern is not with reason alone, with a critical and individualistic exercise of the intellectual faculty as proposed by the Enlightenment, but with right reason and what Aristotle called the "reasoned fact," grounded in the universal and valid principles of perennial philosophy.