When most schools—even colleges—talk about “Logic” today, they are referring to school classes that study modern textbooks designed simply to provide a “Logic course” for those institutions. When we learn, however, that the Catholic Church was the source of the true teaching of the art of reasoning, we realize that there is much more to the subject than modern schools are aware of.
Two of the greatest Doctors of the Catholic Church were St. Albert the Great and St. Thomas Aquinas. Most Catholics who know something about Church history, or who pay attention to the Church calendar, are familiar with these great men. What few know is that we possess their actual teaching on the subject of Logic and the philosophical sciences studied in the CLAA—hundreds of lectures and volumes of commentary.
The Dominicans have translated many of the works of St. Thomas Aquinas because he is widely known and studied, but the works of St. Albert the Great—who was St. Thomas’s teacher—have not been translated to the same degree. I personally own more than thirty volumes of the works of St. Albert the Great, all in Latin.
This year, I am going to change that.
I am currently working to translate the works of St. Albert the Great for students of the Classical Liberal Arts Academy. As I do, we will enrich our Classical Reasoning courses—which already cover the famous works of Aristotle on the subject—and add these lectures and commentaries to those courses. The CLAA will become the only school offering students the opportunity to enjoy a true masterclass in the art of reasoning.
In the meantime, I would like to encourage all students to commit themselves to studying the Academy’s Latin Reading courses. The word-for-word translation method learned in those courses will be used in my translation work, allowing students not only to read the texts in English, but also to learn to read the Latin itself with ease. In these translations, I will provide:
- the original Latin text;
- a literal, word-for-word translation;
- a modernized idiomatic translation.
If students learn to think in English according to the word-for-word order of the Latin language, they will be able to learn to read Latin fluently. This is one of my goals in the CLAA, and there is no reason why it cannot be accomplished.
My translation work should progress quickly because of the help of custom AI tools I have developed over the past year. Because I have worked to establish a systematic method of translation in Greek and Latin, I have been able to break that method down into an assembly line of simple tasks, many of which can be automated. This allows the easier work to be completed quickly, leaving me free to focus on the tasks that require expertise and judgment.
I am sharing this news now so that students can begin strengthening their Latin skills and preparing themselves to make the most of these resources when they become available.
God bless,
Mr. William C. Michael, O.P.
Headmaster
Classical Liberal Arts Academy
