Since the beginning of formal education, and articulated anew to us in our own times, the Church has recognized that Catholic education is not external to the Church’s life and mission but “integral to the mission of the Church to proclaim the Good News.”^[i] Cardinal James Hickey, a former chancellor at the Catholic University of America, said that Catholic universities need to be re-evangelized in order that they may engage in the re-evangelization of the world as an academic community.^[ii] The late cardinal did not then go on to emphasize spiritual experiences alone that were necessary but advocated for a complete infusion of the faith into all dimensions of the academic community. He began his article by quoting the Vatican document The Religious Dimension of Education in a Catholic School. “The special character of the Catholic school and the underlying reason for its existence…is precisely the quality of the religious instruction integrated into the overall education of the students.”^[iii] Catholic education is an integrated education because it knows the true source of unity, the Divine Logos who was made flesh and made his dwelling among us (cf. Jn 1:1, 1:14). This has consequences not only for theological studies but the entire curriculum and pedagogy, expressing a more full view of the world, truth, and human person in each course and activity of an academic community.

With the debates concerning education in America, and the various movements and new school models arising from Catholic communities, there is a question that needs to be consistently central for Catholics: What is distinct about a Catholic Education? Knowing this answer will allow us to determine where legitimate diversity can exist between communities and where change is necessary in order to return to the center. For many Catholic institutions, there is some basic notion that faith is essential for a Catholic education, but it is the logos theology of Joseph Ratzinger that provides an essential foundation for understanding the idea of an integrated education.

Joseph Ratzinger and the Logos

In order to understand Ratzinger’s insight into the logos, it is important to review the prologue of John’s gospel that he reflects upon. “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God; all things were made through him, and without him was not anything made that was made” (Jn 1:1-3, NRSVCE). This Divine “Word became flesh and dwelt among us” (Jn 1:14). Yes, this is a clear reference to Jesus’ divinity and alludes to the Trinity. Jesus is God the Word in the flesh who is the fullness of revelation, the way to the Father. As commentators note, John’s use of “Word” (Logos) comes from both a biblical and philosophical background.^[iv] Within the biblical tradition, this Word of God was involved in the creation of the world (Gen 1:3, Ps 33:6, Prov 8:30, Wis 7:22).   

John is not only appealing to this biblical tradition in his prologue, situated within its echoing of Genesis 1, but he does so in a way that incorporates Greek philosophy to say something else about Jesus. The Greek “logos” (Λόγος) translated as “word” can also be translated as “statement,” “utterance,” “mind,” or “reason.” Within the Greek philosophical tradition there are views of logos that complement the biblical tradition. While it is used in various ways from men with differing views, one may find it used to describe the unifying principle of the cosmos, rationality, truth, governance, a mediator between Creator and man, and even that which gives creation its order, pattern, meaning, and intelligibility. Therefore, the prologue of John can be understood as a convergence of the philosophical and biblical tradition, of faith and reason.^[v] This is true both in what John’s gospel reveals about Jesus’ identity and in John’s use of Greek Philosophical terms to articulate this truth.

In the 2000 edition of Introduction to Christianity, Joseph Ratzinger comments on the importance of what is revealed through John’s prologue.

“Ever since the Prologue to the Gospel of John, the concept of logos has been at the very center of our Christian faith…The God who is logos guarantees the intelligibility to the world, the intelligibility of our existence, the aptitude of reason to know God and the reasonableness of God, even though his understanding infinitely surpasses ours and to us may so often appear to be darkness.”^[vi]  

His interpretation of John was also articulated in the second edition of the English publication of Dogma and Preaching. 

The word “Logos” means, first of all, the same thing as “mind.” To say that the world comes from the Logos, accordingly, means: the world is intelligible; it is the creature of the Mind that expresses itself. Even before we make sense of anything, meaning is there. It embraces us. We stand upon it. The intelligibility does not depend on our creative effort but, rather, precedes and enables it.^[vii]

Ratzinger saw in Jesus as the Logos an understanding of the world. Truth is not relative. Meaning is not ours to assign to the things of the universe but to discover. The creative logic behind such a meaning-full world even allows us to share in his reason. In Introduction to Christianity, Ratzinger states that thinking “is, indeed, only a rethinking of what in reality has already been thought out beforehand.”^[viii] Commenting on Ratzinger’s view of faith and reason, Aidan Nichols notes, “Man can rethink the logos, the meaning of being, because his own logos, his own reason, is logos of the one logos, thought of the original thought, of the creative spirit that permeates and governs his being.”^[ix] Saint John Henry Newman similarly noted, “He has also implicated Himself with it [creation], and takes it into His very bosom, by His presence in it, His providence over it, His impressions upon it, and His influences through it, that we cannot truly or fully contemplate it without in some main aspects contemplating Him.”^[x] Among other things, this means that God and authentic belief in God can never be categorized as irrational or anti-reason since God is the Reason that human reason stands upon. This interpretation and understanding is found in the early Church as well. For example, after referring to God as the Author of Reason, Tertullian explains that reason is not separate from God or God’s counterpart but rather of God himself and that all reasonable ventures are possible because of God (On Repentance, 1). The intelligibility of the universe and our intelligence to know it are products of a God who is Logos. Human reasoning is a share in the reason of God.

While Ratzinger does articulate a view of reason that might surprise some of the Church’s critics, he is not arguing for an elevation of reason that results in a worldview and anthropology reflective of deism. Rather, Ratzinger understands this Divine Logos as One who is and is for us. “The logos of the whole world, the creative original thought, is at the same time love.”^[xi] The Divine Logos is love. Christianity knows that there is objective meaning, and the uniquely Christian contribution to the conversation is the revelation that “this meaning knows me and loves me.”^[xii] This is not only articulated in his early masterpiece Introduction to Christianity but throughout his life and into his pontificate as Benedict XVI (cf. Deus Caritas Est, 1). John’s gospel opens with the explosive claim that Jesus is the Divine Logos, but that is only the beginning. The Divine Logos was made flesh (Jn 1:14) in order to bring us something more than meaning and intelligibility; the Divine Logos was made flesh in order to mediate grace and revealed truth (cf. Jn 1:16-17). “For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but may have eternal life” (Jn 3:16). John may begin with Jesus as the Divine Logos, but the rest of his gospel is the good news of the ongoing incarnational descent of Love. Jesus is the Divine Logos that creates and sustains the cosmos (Col 1:15-17), and because of this, creation has its logos, its intelligibility. In a book on creation, Ratzinger succinctly states the above principles: “The reasonableness of creation derives from God’s Reason,”[xiii] and the “reasonableness of the universe provides us access to God’s Reason.”^[xiv] Jesus mediates creation, divine revelation, and salvation. The revelation of Jesus as the incarnate Logos (cf. Rev 19:13) not only contributes to the universalization of revealed religion but also reveals reason and truth’s Christological form. The implications of Jesus as the Logos will be central to the educational enterprise of Catholic academic communities, and without it such communities will struggle to escape a fragmented or even nihilistic counterfeit view of reality, and struggle to fulfill its role within the Church.

The Unity of Truth

Recall the question from Pilate at the trial of Jesus: “What is truth?” (Jn 18:38) The irony of this question was that Pilate asked this question of him who is truth itself, “I am…the truth” (Jn 14:6). Pilate may have considered truth to be merely the facts of the case in front of him. Yet, there is also a wider perspective that understands the specifics as part of a greater whole of reality, a unity of truth.

Let us return to the essential question of Pilate and consider how it relates to Jesus. What is truth? Saint Thomas explains in the Summa that “truth is defined by the conformity of intellect and thing.”^[xv] If man can understand the world around him, rather than man simply imposing his own meaning, then truth consists of having an accurate understanding. Jesus is the truth because as the Divine Reason, as the Divine Mind, he is the mind of God. He is that which the world was made to conform to. “Creation is born of the Logos and indelibly bears the mark of the creative Reason which orders and directs it” (Verbum Domini, 8). From Jesus the “mediator and the fullness of all revelation” (Dei Verbum, 2), we are meant to also “receive the Word…to let oneself be shaped by him, and thus to be conformed by the power of the Holy Spirit to Christ” (Verbum Domini, 50). It is Benedict XVI, Joseph Ratzinger, that gifted the Church Verbum Domini. In the same section just quoted, he also added, “Not to receive him means not to listen to his voice, not to be conformed to the Logos.” Jesus is the truth, the Logos or Divine Mind that we are to conform ourselves to. For Catholic education this means that Jesus is central not only for theology but for every subject or discipline, for every nook and cranny of the Catholic university or academy. For a Catholic education interested in truth, it must conform to Jesus. 

Prior to discussing some of these very same themes above, Saint John Paul II in Fides et Ratio mentions the “unity of truth.” He teaches that the “unity of truth is a fundamental premise of human reasoning, as the principle of non-contradiction makes clear” (Fides et Ratio, 34). In relation to this, although chronologically preceding Saint John Paul II, the First Vatican Council teaches that “God cannot deny himself, nor can truth ever be in opposition to truth” (Dei Felius, 4.6). This council recognized that God’s revelation and sound conclusions of reason cannot be in actual contradiction. While the unity of truth is implied by the principle of non-contradiction, revelation introduces Christ as central (Fides et Ratio, 34, cf. CCC, 2465).

This view does not appear to be known or well understood by the rising numbers of young people leaving the Church that view faith and science opposed to each other. While relativism has been on the rise in various forms for decades, there are some that not only think faith and science are incompatible, but some who question whether or not truth can even be known. Saint John Paul II wisely understood the initial task set before Catholic schools in America: “The greatest challenge to Catholic education today, and the greatest contribution that authentically Catholic education can make to American culture, is to restore to the culture the conviction that human beings can grasp the truth of things, and in grasping that truth, can know their duties to God, to themselves and their neighbors.”^[xvi] Building upon this foundation, Catholic schools also have the task of witnessing to the unity of truth and an integrated worldview that finds its origin, meaning, and summit in Christ. To do this, Catholic education must rediscover its uniqueness as a fully integrated education. Graduates of such institutions will enter their fields as witnesses that there is truth, that truth can be known, and that his name is Jesus.^[xvii]

An Integrated Education 

With various educational institutions that exist within the Church, exploring the university a bit further will provide insights into an integrated education that will be applicable for academic communities dedicated to younger students as well. Considering the “university,” the word “universum” refers to universals or the universal, the “unified totality of the real as such” and, as Josef Pieper explains, the university is an institution “concerned in a unique way with the totality of things—with the whole of the world.”^[xviii] All university disciplines are connected because of their common source, the Incarnate Divine Reason. They are each aspects of an integrated whole, a unified reality. In The Idea of a University, Saint John Henry Newman also spoke of God in relation to this unity of truth.

Admit a God, and you introduce among the subjects of your knowledge, a fact encompassing, closing in upon, absorbing, every other fact conceivable. How can we investigate any part of any order of Knowledge, and stop short of that which enters into every order? All true principles run over with it, all phenomena converge to it; it is truly the First and the Last. In word indeed, and in idea, it is easy enough to divide Knowledge into human and divine, secular and religious, and to lay down that we will address ourselves to the one without interfering with the other; but it is impossible in fact.^[xix]

Here Newman is noting how God cannot be easily segregated into a singular discipline completely. For Catholic education, there cannot be a sharp and impenetrable divide between “secular and religious” disciplines. Christ is the source of all one might put into these categories, although in differing ways. An integrated education realizes that such a disintegration and fragmentation is dangerous and, as Newman said, “it is impossible in fact.” Elsewhere, Newman states that God has “implicated Himself in all the history of creation, the constitution of nature, the course of the world, the origin of society, the fortunes of nations, the action of the human mind.”^[xx] There is no discipline within a Catholic university or school that can be free of God. 

This unity of truth does not confuse creation with the Creator. Yes, God is distinct from creation. Yet, “He has also implicated Himself with it, and takes it into His very bosom, by His presence in it, His providence over it, His impressions upon it, and His influences through it, that we cannot truly or fully contemplate it without in some main aspects contemplating Him.”^[xxi] If this is true, then a Catholic education will never be able to completely put God and the other objects of study in totally separate boxes without betraying its own insight into reality. If reality and history find their origin, end, and unity in God, then the light of faith must be brought to shine on all academic pursuits as the dialogue between faith and reason. An academic community’s studies must then be taught in an integrated way that gives witnesses to the unity of truth.

In the cornerstone magisterial text for universities, Ex Corde Ecclesiae, words like “integration” or “unity” do not receive explicit focus until no. 16 of the apostolic constitution. Saint John Paul II explains that the integration of knowledge is a process that will never be complete. Despite the challenges brought to bear on this process, every university, but “especially a Catholic University,” is to pursue this process in the pursuit of truth (Ex Corde Ecclesiae, 16). Like Pieper and Newman, Saint John Paul II recognized the very nature of the university as oriented toward the unity of truth and therefore oriented toward the process of integration. He then names theology and philosophy as uniquely suited for assisting in the discernment of each discipline’s “place and meaning” within the integrated whole with “faith in Christ, the Logos, as the center of creation and of human history” (ECE, 16). Notice that the pontiff concludes his paragraph on integration with an appeal to Christ as the Logos. 

Echoing the role of theology in this process, let us consider a never delivered addressed by Pope Benedict XVI. Benedict XVI was to visit La Sapienza University in 2008, but the visit was canceled due to protests by some students that saw the pope as the enemy of science and reason, clearly demonstrating their poor understanding of the university, reason, the liberal arts, and common decency. The address was later made available and is referred to as “The Truth Makes Us Good and Goodness is True.” In it, the pontiff explains that the various disciplines need something beyond themselves for their own good. He notes that this understanding was reflected in the first medieval universities where philosophy and theology existed alongside law. “Besides the faculty of jurisprudence, there were faculties of philosophy and theology, which were entrusted with the task of studying the human being in his totality, thus safeguarding sensibility to the truth.”^[xxii] This presumes a university that does not simply allow rooms to be booked for classes by the various disciplines but for a university that sees each discipline as standing in relation to the other, with theology and philosophy helping the others to remain open to the unity of truth with a broader vision of reality. Newman also references the importance of experiencing an institution in which the range of subjects are present together, such as natural science along theology. In his fifth discourse on the university he describes the benefit of students of a liberal education being surrounded by those disciplines “who represent the whole circle” of knowledge and form a philosophical habit of mind.^[xxiii] 

Such an integrated education, integrated in Christ the Logos, is not as simple as praying before math class or occasionally stating that God is the creator in biology, although these are important and good. It requires a transformation of curriculum and pedagogy; such a transformation will sometimes provide supposed tensions, and exploring such tensions can be immensely fruitful. The faith and the pursuits of the theology classroom will serve as a light to the other subjects, and the other subjects will also serve to enhance the theological conversation (cf. Verbum Domini, 36). Such an education will result in an academic community where theology recognizes the “validity and importance of scientific inquiry” and “science and technology…recognize that their inquiries do not exhaust the horizons of the human person created in the image and likeness of God and called to eternal life.”^[xxiv]  Consider the light that Catholic Social Teaching can provide for the study of economics or Humani Generis for the study of biology.^[xxv] This is about a robust interdisciplinary approach that in its totality is understood by instructor and student to be Christocentric studies in the manner discussed above, and what the Western tradition has called the Liberal Arts. This is more than each subject topically integrated into the others; one sees such an approach, for example, in curricula that organize grades and subject focus by historical period. For example, ninth graders studying the ancients in history, the Old Testament in theology, Plato and Aristotle in philosophy, and profiling Euclid in mathematics. While this may be helpful, it must be an intentional integration in Christ, the One with whom our studies are from, with, and for. 

There is a real danger in trying to integrate subjects around Christ if done incorrectly. One may take the easier and more fundamentalist approach of reducing each subject to a pseudo-theology class.^[xxvi] An important balance needs to be found. In Saint Pope John Paul II’s Ex Corde Ecclesiae on Catholic Universities, one finds principles for managing the difficult balance in an integrated Catholic education. While the entirety of the text is a treasury of wisdom, one of its central themes is the balance between being a university and being Catholic (ECE, 12-29). The earlier mention of transforming the curriculum and pedagogy in Christ is not meant to be understood as the loss of the original discipline’s focus or methodologies but a transformation that enhances and frees the discipline for greatness and authentic progress (ECE, 12-14, 17, 22). A parallel could be made with the central theme mentioned here; for any stage of education, a biology course needs to balance being a biology class and being Catholic. 

In a 1992 address to the Pontifical Academy of Sciences, Saint John Paul II reflected upon the synthesizing of knowledge and the integration of learning, and on the Galileo case. 

The birth of a new way of approaching the study of natural phenomena demands a clarification on the part of all disciplines of knowledge. It obliges them to define more clearly their own field, their approach, their methods, as well as the precise import of their conclusions. In other words, this new way requires each discipline to become more rigorously aware of its own nature.^[xxvii]

There exist two realms of knowledge, one which has its source in Revelation and one which reason can discover by its own power. To the latter belong especially the experimental sciences and philosophy. The distinction between the two realms of knowledge ought not to be understood as opposition. The two realms are not altogether foreign to each other; they have points of contact. The methodologies proper to each make it possible to bring out different aspects of reality. ^[xxviii]

Note that they bring out not different realities, but different aspects of the one reality. The pontiff concludes the address with an echo of the ideas we examined earlier in the thought of Ratzinger. The “intelligibility, attested to by the marvelous discoveries of science and technology, leads us, in the last analysis, to that transcendent and primordial Thought imprinted on all things.” Consider an integrated education’s impact on scientists, medical doctors, and mathematicians that not only equips for expertise but orients such experts to realize the importance of other disciplines, including theology, and to notice their own discipline’s relationship to the transcendent. 

Integrating the light of faith across all disciplines presents a real challenge. What if the Catholic educator received training in their discipline but one void of such an integration in Christ? Even more challenging, what if a teacher in a Catholic academic community is not Catholic and is unaware of the faith beyond generalities? To retain an integrated Catholic education, the academic community must ensure in the onboarding process or through annual formation or both, that educators receive formation to assist them in teaching their discipline in a Catholic and integrated way. This includes general catechesis, but it must also include the means of understanding their discipline and its corresponding pedagogy in a new way. Simply being trained as an educator and in one’s discipline(s) of specialization is not enough. The Catholic educator must also be a life-long student of Jesus, the Incarnate Logos, and possess the philosophical habit of mind. Newman notes in his work on the university that such an academic community will become an “assemblage of learned men, zealous for their own sciences, and rivals of each other, are brought, by familiar intercourse and for the sake of intellectual peace, to adjust together the claims and relations of their respective subjects of investigation. They learn to respect, to consult, to aid each other.”^[xxix]  

When one considers Catholic education, whether K-12 or the university, one tends to think of Mass at the chapel, theology class, prayer before classes, crucifixes on the wall, retreats, service projects, liturgical feasts, and rosaries. It makes sense that these things would show up within a Catholic education, but they are not enough. In his Communio article “Towards a Distinctively Catholic School,” Stratford Caldecott notes that if God is the unifying principle of all human knowledge, then only when this principle is accounted for throughout the curriculum can Catholic schools find their unity and harmony.^[xxx] In the context of Ratzinger, Christ as the Incarnate Reason makes possible the dialogue between faith and reason and provides the means for an integrated education, a Catholic education. Although they are essential, the renewal of a Catholic school is not just about the chapel and theology class, but about the science classroom, the art studio, the choir room, the athletic programs, and in a word: everything. 

Dr. Brandon Harvey is the assistant director of undergraduate programs and literature professor at Catholic International University.