The Catholic Intellectual Tradition and Catholic Pedagogy

Monika Hellwig (1929-2005)

We often speak about the Catholic Intellectual Tradition (CIT) and indeed have integrated CIT into the curriculum of Saint Michael’s College.  Monika Hellwig, to whom many in contemporary Catholic education look for guidance regarding CIT, noted the dual nature of CIT.  Its content encompasses centuries of reflection, exploration, and teaching, whose content can be found in the great literature and artifacts of the West.  Hellwig, however, speaks of something more than the products of Christian culture.  There exists an approach and method by which knowledge in the tradition of CIT has been built up.  At the very heart of CIT is the relationship of faith and reason, the belief that our use of reason to understand the world and human experience can be and ought to be guided by Christian belief and that certainty about the world which comes from God’s self-revelation is for the sake of our understanding the world and in response to our desire to know truth itself.

It needs to be noted that CIT is not a finished product but rather an ongoing search for the truth as guided by faith.  Indeed, all who seriously seek the truth, even without a faith tradition, contribute in their own way to that search for ultimate truth.  Both the believer and the non-believer do not possess an ultimate truth.  For the believer, ultimate truth is God, who cannot be possessed.  For the non-believer, ultimate truth is perhaps that horizon toward which they strive, convinced that truth itself is possible and worth the journey, even if never fully achieved—the horizon is always distant.  For both, there exists that desire to know and to understand, an inherently human dimension in life.

What follows attempts to ponder this desire for that truth which is ultimate and underlies all that is.  Admittedly, the perspective is Catholic, but the intent is meant for all.

Walt Whitman penned in the sixth section of the poem Song of Myself both a query and a response.

Walt Whitman (1819-1892)

A child said What is grass? fetching it to me with full hands;/How could I answer the child? I do not know what it is any more than he.

Or I guess it is the handkerchief of the Lord,/A scented gift and remembrancer designedly dropt,/
Bearing the owner’s name someway in the corners, that we may see and remark, and say Whose?

There is in these lines perhaps something of the great scholastic tradition in which knowledge of God can never be known through direct experience of God.  Rather, as Thomas Aquinas argued, what we know of God is acquired through our observation of what God has made, a secondary knowledge discovered in the handiwork of God.  In this tradition of thought, the world is that “handkerchief of the Lord” whose name we seek to know, never directly but through our experience and exploration of ourselves and the world in which we live.

Hildegard von Bingen captures this notion in her writing as well when she spoke of veriditas (greenness), that fecundity of human existence and the world as evidence of God’s underlying presence, giving both health and wholeness to all that God has brought into existence.  Hildegard von Bingen’s poetry speaks to the truth that all creation reveals God:

Hildegard of Bingen (1098-1179)

In Nature, God established humankind in power.
We are dressed in the scaffold of creation:
in seeing—to understand,
in smelling—to discern,
in tasting—to nurture,
in touching—to govern.
In this way humankind comes to know God,
for God is the author of all creation.

To know the world is to encounter God, the first cause and final cause of all that is.  Our journey is one in which we first experience the world and then ask why?  Our education begins with the human experience of self, others, and the world we all inhabit.  We then seek to understand the world and long to find meaning in what we experience.  Toward that end, as Lev Vygotsky would have it, we enter into relationships of learning by which those more experienced than ourselves guide unknowing to knowing and misunderstanding to comprehension, all in terms of a world shaped by culture and belief, the “given” of what is passed on and received.  However, there is in this journey of learning the possibility of something more, a further knowledge than the immediate and tactile.  Christian Smith, a sociologist of religion, as well as Paul Tillich, a Protestant theologian of note, speak of that possibility in each of us to know beyond what is immediate and tactile and so reach a level of humanity in which we come to know that truth beyond the truth of this world only, a truth of that Other who seeks to be known by all and whose handiwork reveals the author of all truth for those who are willing to see with their eyes and to hear with their ears (Ezekiel 44:5).  For Monika Hellwig, the CIT is the way in which people of faith interpret “all their experiences in terms of the pervasive presence of the sacred and in terms of a history of salvation” (“The Catholic Intellectual Tradition in the Catholic University” in Examining the Catholic Intellectual Tradition, 10).

There is in this a Catholic pedagogy appropriate to a Catholic college.  And, there is in this also a way of understanding what it means to teach in a Catholic college.  If you would like to comment, please email me at dtheroux@smcvt.edu.  Let’s talk.