Last night, I received an email from a contact who had some questions about the Classical Liberal Arts Academy curriculum, and as I looked at the questions, I thought they might actually be questions that others would like answers to. So what I’m going to do in this talk today is answer those questions in a video talk that I can share back to the man who sent them to me, but I’ll also post them because, as I said, I think these questions may be in the minds of some others. They’re good questions, and I’d like to take my time and talk about them, rather than try to type responses.
Question #1
When you refer to classical education, what exactly is it that you mean? What is the exact curriculum that you are trying to recreate, where or when in history is this curriculum?
Really great question! I wish that Catholic parents would have asked this question back in the 1990s because they could have avoided getting sucked into the classical education movement that turned out to be a big waste of time.
When I talk about classical education, first of all, I’m talking about a stream of development that began in the ancient world and continued through medieval times and continues today. So we’re not talking about an overly simplistic idea of taking a snapshot of any particular moment in history and saying, “This is what we’re going to do. We’re going to pretend that we’re fourth century Greeks living after the Persian Wars, and we’re going to do what they did, because that’s real classical education.” We’re also not going to take a snapshot of 13th century Paris and say, “This is what we’re going to do. We’re going to recreate the University of Paris curriculum from 1215, and we’re going to do that in 2026.” We’re not doing that. We’re also not going to take the Ratio Studiorum of the Jesuits from 1599 and say, “This is exactly what we’re going to do. We’re just going to restore that in 2026.”
As I said, classical education—and I’ll get into the definition of that in just a second—is a work of the entire human race, or I should say, of the wise men of the human race that has developed over thousands of years. I wrote about this entire history in the book “Understanding Classical Catholic Education,” which is available for free on the Classical Liberal Arts Academy website. The seven liberal arts developed over time. So you can’t take a snapshot and say, “When are you going to choose the ideal time or the golden age of classical education and restore that?”
I’ll give you an example. We could go back and look at the writings of Plato, and many—though I think that this is an error—many seem to have a great admiration for Plato, but if you actually would look at the place that Plato holds in the history of philosophy, it’s not a place where you would copy that and paste it into the 21st century AD. The reason why is because philosophy wasn’t even established at the time of Plato, and what Socrates and Plato were doing was really just getting things started. The Socratic method, which again was hijacked and misrepresented by the classical education movement of the 1990s, was the beginning of the development of dialectical reasoning, which is one part of the art of reasoning, or logic.
Aristotle, in the next generation after Plato, was the one who established the art of demonstrative reasoning and brought the whole system of human reasoning together in his Organon—the title of that series of books that Aristotle wrote. The Organon provided the method of investigation for the philosophical sciences. That’s why you don’t see Plato writing any books like those that Aristotle wrote. You don’t see a science of ethics like we find in Nicomachean Ethics. We don’t find that before Aristotle. You won’t find physics or metaphysics. You won’t find a treatise on the soul before Aristotle, because Aristotle was the discoverer of the method of philosophical investigation, which is demonstrative reasoning, which is taught in the Posterior Analytics in Aristotle’s Organon.
So there is a historical development that comes through time. Many of the great ancient philosophers were great because they were making breakthroughs in human philosophy, but they were really just scratching the surface. It’s like going back and reading the Old Testament. The Old Testament prophets were great because they were revealing pieces of the puzzle picture. They were revealing parts of the message, but the message would never be understood until Christ was manifested in the flesh, and he refers to this as the fullness of time.
So throughout human philosophy, throughout human education, men are working to get and give the best possible education at the present moment, but they’re also aware that there’s a lot that they still don’t understand, and so they’re working to learn what is known and also discover what remains unknown. So there’s always this “already and not yet” aspect to education, and that continues all through and will continue all through human history.
So we’re not taking a snapshot. We’re not trying to be Amish people. We’re not trying to live like, you know, “Little House on the Prairie.” It’s not this overly simplistic idea of picking a generation and saying we’re going to live as if we were members of that generation. We’re not historical reenactors like we find at Colonial Williamsburg. So we’re not just restoring a historical moment in education. So get that overly simplistic idea out of your head.
I always quote C.S. Lewis because he gave the best articulation of the challenge that we face. If we go back into the ancient world and we start, let’s say, with Abraham and Moses and Solomon, and then we come up through Pythagoras and Plato and Aristotle and into Roman philosophy with Cicero and Seneca, and then we go on into the Christian era with Jerome and Ambrose and Augustine and Chrysostom, and then into the Middle Ages with St. Albert and St. Thomas and St. Bonaventure, we find that there is a continual development of human learning. All of those men consider themselves members of a developing system of learning.
Thomas Aquinas is commenting and adding to and perfecting the philosophical teachings of Aristotle. He writes commentaries on the works of Aristotle. You’ll notice that St. Thomas doesn’t write commentaries on the works of Plato. He writes commentaries on the works of Aristotle because Aristotle represented the height of Greek philosophy. Where Aristotle left off, Christians picked up. So we find Thomas Aquinas commenting on Aristotle’s philosophy, and that’s what he was actually teaching in the 1200s in Paris.
So we’re not taking a historical snapshot of any moment in time and saying, “This is classical education.” We’re not doing that with the generation of Aquinas in the 13th century with scholasticism. I mean, that’s a climax, we could say, of Catholic philosophy because of the greatness of the men who were alive at the time: St. Albert the Great, St. Thomas, and St. Bonaventure. All right there, within one century, education and learning took a radical step upwards and forward. But there is still much more to develop over time. St. Thomas was still working out theological controversies that were yet unsettled.
We look at a doctrine in Catholic theology that is so central: the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception. And that wasn’t established as dogmatic in the Catholic Church until the time of St. Bernadette in the 1800s. So there is this constant development, not only of Catholic doctrine, but also of philosophical learning and understanding. That development of learning extends all the way back to the beginning of time.
Now the problem, as I mentioned, that C.S. Lewis commented on, is that we can look at a particular point in history and we can say at this point in history, men took a sharp left and veered from that path of development. They went in a completely different direction. And it’s very easy to show that this happened because the men who did it knew that they were doing that, and they did it intentionally.
With respect to philosophy, it was Francis Bacon who wrote the Novum Organum, and what that means is “the new Organon.” In other words, we’re abandoning Aristotle’s method of investigation, which is the art of reasoning, and we’re proposing something new and different, namely the scientific method. And for the past 500 years, we’ve seen this new path develop, this path where experimental science has become the method by which men investigate the same subjects that Aristotle and the great philosophers did in the ancient world. They investigate the natural world, that’s true. They investigate all material things, but they go beyond that into psychology, into morals, into social studies, into all different fields that belonged to philosophy in the past. And they try to give a materialistic explanation for everything.
This stream of human learning is based on completely different principles than that ancient stream was based on, and it’s a different stream. And so when you look at where we are in 2026 and you see how that stream that started with Bacon has continually changed and reorganized itself, we come to the point now—I strongly recommend if you’re ever going to take a college course, take a course on the history of the philosophy of science. It’s one of the most important courses you can take, and I can recommend a book to read if you’d like to read one.
But the history of the philosophy of science traces this new stream of development, and it’s come to a dead end, just like the Protestant Reformation was short-sighted and it’s come to a point where it’s failing. And we can see this because originally what Bacon proposed was that we would use experimental evidence, actual observations, actual reproducible demonstrations of material facts, and they would provide the certitude for our beliefs and ideas about the world. But if you get into science today, you will find that the arguments are not presented with experimental data for their evidence. You will find that what is taught today in the name of science or inductive philosophy is what is held by the “quote, unquote” consensus of researchers or consensus of scientists.
In other words, what has developed is a sort of Magisterium in the scientific or in the academic community that decides what the official answer is, what the authoritative interpretation of the data will be, and everyone else is told to accept that, not by demonstration, not by sight, but by faith. You’re told to believe in the certitude of the consensus. So this new Organon has not led us to great breakthroughs in the pursuit of human happiness. What it’s done is led us to a counterfeit Magisterium, which was the original intention behind it—not necessarily of the men who proposed it, but the spirit that inspired it.
What C.S. Lewis said is we now stand four or 500 years down this wrong road, and we’re stuck, and everyone is trying to force us to keep running, but we know that we shouldn’t keep running down this road, and they say, “Just keep going. Just move forward. We can continue to make progress.” But C.S. Lewis said progress means getting closer to the goal. And if you’ve gone down a wrong road and you’re now off course and no longer headed toward that goal, the only way that you can make progress is to go back to the right road.
So there is a historical point that we focus on when we talk about restoring classical education, and that point is beginning in, let’s say, the early 1500s with the Protestant Reformation and the scientific revolution. Think about the Galileo controversy. All of those events, we see a number of different manifestations of the same movement: Protestantism, Baconian inductive philosophy, or the so-called scientific method, and so on.
So when we talk about restoring classical education, we mean going back to that road, going back to that tradition that began in the ancient world and continued through Pythagoras, through Plato and Aristotle, through Cicero and Seneca, through the Christian Church Fathers, through the Scholastic philosophers, and was abandoned at the time of the Reformation and scientific revolution in the 1500s.
A good example of what I’m talking about can be seen in the work that the Jesuits did in their early days when St. Ignatius of Loyola and the Jesuits were founded. They took up this work of fighting against the Protestant Reformation. And I use the word “Reformation” only because that’s common. It obviously was not a reformation of anything. It was a schism. But St. Ignatius of Loyola and the Jesuits made the head of the spear of their Company of Jesus the work of education.
And if you go back and look at the Ratio Studiorum that was published in 1599, you can find an English translation of it on the Classical Liberal Arts Academy website. You’ll see that what they did was restore scholastic education. They basically argued that what we need to do to fight these current movements is restore, preserve, defend, and promote scholastic education. And you can read the details of their program in the Ratio Studiorum, the rule of studies for the Jesuit order. And again, the date of that was 1599.
So if you look at that period—that crucial period, the time of the Protestant schism, the scientific revolution, and the rise of the Jesuits and their work in education—you can see what I would say is the fork in the road where everyone took a left. And there’s lots of reasons why most people went left, largely because of the influence of secular powers that threatened them and bribed them to do so.
So that’s what I would recommend as the point where we fell away. Now in 2026, our circumstances are very different than theirs. We live in a society that is very different from that which the Jesuits lived in in the 16th century. The things that they did, but more importantly, the things that they did not do, should not be the same in our programs today.
For example, if you go back and look at the history of Jesuit education, the Jesuits didn’t deal with young children. They left the work of preparatory education to others. They just didn’t have the resources; they didn’t have the manpower. If you look at their schools, they didn’t get into mathematics at all. And so you can see that there are gaps in that Jesuit school program, not by design, not because they intended that, not because they thought that their program was perfect as it was, but because it simply was not practicable for them to do more than they were doing.
What they were doing was already heroic and hard to comprehend. They were offering schools that restored that scholastic education, that classical tradition of learning, and they did so for free, and they did so all over Europe, and those schools spread like wildfire and largely preserved Catholic learning and culture. So that’s the work that they did. But what they did wasn’t perfect, because they were limited in manpower.
You may not know this, but the Company of Jesus, or the Jesuit order, they were actually exempted, as a religious community, from praying the Divine Office, because their missionary work was considered so urgent and necessary. They were exempted or dispensed from the responsibility to pray the Divine Office, because that’s obviously so time-consuming. And they had so much work to do that they asked to be dispensed so that they could just focus on that work, and they were granted that dispensation by the Vatican.
So that puts us at 1600. If you go on, as I’ve shared recently, if you go down to 1879, Pope Leo XIII, at another crucial time in Church history—we know that Pope Leo XIII gave the Church the prayer to St. Michael, but he also wrote an encyclical, or published an encyclical, that called for the restoration of what he called Christian philosophy. He called for the restoration of Christian philosophy. And in that encyclical, you can read the whole thing. It’s called “Aeterni Patris,” and the subtitle in English is “On the Restoration of Christian Philosophy.” He explains that the Catholic Church must preserve and restore and promote scholastic theology.
So again, it’s a call for this continuation of scholasticism, which, when we talk about scholasticism, we’re talking about this ancient tradition of human learning that began in the ancient world and continued through all the great philosophers, through the Church Fathers, through the Middle Ages, and continues today. There’s only one stream of human learning, and that’s what I refer to when I talk about classical education.
So it’s the same thing that Aristotle was working on. It’s the same thing Pythagoras was working on, the same thing that Moses and Solomon were working on. It’s the same thing that Pope Leo XIII was talking about in 1879, the same thing St. Thomas Aquinas was promoting in the 1200s. It’s one stream of human learning developing for thousands of years, and we stand in 2026 and the question that we should be asking is, “What does that stream look like in 2026?”
We have resources and tools that the Jesuits couldn’t have dreamed of. So our program should not look like the Jesuit program. We can do much more than them. We have to ask the question, “What does the stream look like? What is the current status of this stream of human learning in 2026?” And my answer to that question is what you see in the Classical Liberal Arts Academy.
Again, like the Jesuit education in the 16th century, it’s a work in progress. It’s developing. It’s what exists based on what we’ve been able to do thus far. So I don’t think you should look at it and say, “Oh, this is perfect.” No, we’re in the midst of working on this. We’re in the midst of doing it.
If you look at the mission of the Classical Liberal Arts Academy, it’s to research, because we have to learn this; restore, because it’s all got to be brought back together; publish, that means make it accessible to students; and then teach—actually get into the work of education and teach it beginning in the 21st century, with all of the new resources, tools, and benefits that we have available to us.
So to bring that answer to a close: When you refer to classical education, what exactly is it that you mean? What is the exact curriculum that you are trying to recreate, where or when in history is this curriculum? I think that’s been answered. All right. If there’s anything else you want to ask about what I’ve said or get into that any deeper, I’d be happy to do so. But I think that’s sufficient for that first question.
Question #2
“If classical refers to ancient Greece and Rome, would it be more accurate to say you provide a scholastic curriculum? I ask because I noticed about a third of your courses in the bachelor’s program are more recent than the classical period.”
I think I’ve answered this in that first answer. When I say classical education, I certainly include the education as it existed in ancient Greece and in ancient Rome. And when we talk about classical scholastic education, we’re not talking about something different. We’re talking about something as it continued to develop for centuries after Greek and Roman time.
St. Thomas Aquinas would not consider himself to be on a different path than Cicero and Aristotle. St. Thomas Aquinas would consider himself to be on the same path. That’s why, in the Summa Theologiae, when St. Thomas needs to establish the certainty of a philosophical assertion, he’ll simply quote Aristotle, because in his thinking, if Aristotle has demonstrated this and you are on the same path that Aquinas is on, then you should accept the authority of Aristotle.
Aquinas, in scholasticism, doesn’t believe that he’s on a different path. He believes he’s on an advanced point on that same path with many benefits—all the benefits of the revelation of the Word of God, that is, the Incarnation of Christ and the foundation of the Church and the gift of the Holy Spirit, hundreds and hundreds of years of development through the inspiration of the apostles, the work of the Church Fathers, all inherited by Thomas Aquinas.
He sees all of that—the development of divine revelation through Old Testament Israel, through all of the prophets of the Old Testament, and the development of human philosophy through all of the great philosophers. He sees all of that as one movement, and he sees himself standing at the end of that path with those two rivers, as it were, coming together, and him standing in the midst of those rivers. So there’s not this idea of blocks of time or separate paths. It’s one path. It’s one history of development of human learning.
So when you look at the Classical Liberal Arts Academy curriculum, you’ll see that there are courses, as you mentioned, where we study Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics, and there are other courses where we study Thomas Aquinas’s Summa Contra Gentiles and we study Thomas Aquinas’s Summa Theologiae. So it’s not that we’re studying a couple of different curricula all sort of confused into one big mess, or that we’re confused about what we’re doing. It’s that if you want to study the art of geometry, no one ever advanced beyond what Euclid produced in his Elements, and so we study Euclid’s Elements. No one ever did any work that surpassed Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics as regards moral philosophy. So we study Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics.
Now Thomas Aquinas wrote a commentary on it. But even there, notice, Thomas Aquinas didn’t replace the Nicomachean Ethics. He simply read it to his classes and commented on it with the advantage of commenting on it 1500 years after it was written, and he allowed the light of the Christian faith to shine upon it, to add and enrich our understanding of human morals. But he taught Nicomachean Ethics. He wrote the Summa Theologiae. You see the difference there?
So in 2026, when we put the whole curriculum together, for Latin grammar we study the grammar of Emmanuel Alvarez that was written at the time of the Jesuits, because he did the work of bringing together the resources that were available at the time to produce a great Latin grammar textbook. We study Aristotle’s Organon, because that’s the place where the method of investigation was established and taught by the master of it. We do the same for rhetoric. We also study Cicero’s rhetoric. Cicero lived hundreds of years after Aristotle. He was another master of the art of rhetoric and added his own comments and thoughts and experiences to the work of Aristotle. He considered himself to be a Peripatetic, or a follower of Aristotle.
So we can see that they viewed the history of education not as a bunch of different schools. There were a bunch of different schools, but most of the schools were not on the path of true philosophy. For example, the Epicureans would not be considered a part of this path. They would be considered a group of philosophers who actually were not on the true path. Stoics might be considered members of this path as regards moral philosophy, but not as regards other topics.
So they understood that there was one path, one thread, and the philosophers who walked on that path and contributed to the development of learning on that path were always preserved. And in our curriculum, that’s what you see. You see where we are in 2026: a curriculum composed of most of the works that have been put together over time, which represent the best teaching, the most authoritative and masterful teaching on these subjects in our day, and that’s our curriculum.
All right, that’s question number two.
Question #3
“Are there any more recent books that you have thought are capable of supplanting a text from the ancient times? For example, a book on ethics that incorporates Aristotle’s thought but also divine revelation. I have heard that in the late 19th and early 20th century, many Thomistic manuals were written that attempted something like this.”
My answer to this would be no. My answer would be no. And there’s a couple of problems in what you say here that might reveal what you’re getting hung up on. So I think that I might be able to help solve a problem that you have and unloose some confusion.
What you say there—you say, “Are there any modern books?” And I understand what you’re saying. You’re saying, “Has there been work done by wise men in modern times where they sort of made a synthesis of Aristotelian writing on, let’s say, moral philosophy, but integrated it with Christian moral theology to create a more perfect moral textbook or moral teaching?”
The problem with that idea is that philosophy and theology are really two different subjects. They’re two completely different things, and they serve two different purposes. So mixing divine revelation into Aristotle’s ethics would not necessarily be a good thing; might even be a bad thing. And I’ll explain that.
What makes philosophy philosophy is that it’s based entirely on human reason and human observation. Philosophy is a human science. Theology is science based on divine revelation. That’s the difference between philosophy and theology. So mixing them together really isn’t a good idea because they serve different purposes.
We really want both, because our role in the world is more complicated than just knowing the truth. If all we were seeking was to know the truth, then what you’re proposing might be a good idea. If the goal was just to know the truth, then coming up with this synthesis of philosophy and theology might be the best solution, the best study material. But that’s not our mission.
And this is a really great topic that you’ve kind of stumbled into here. Because what I would say is that your idea of learning—and I’m not saying this is yours, like you’re married to it, just the way this question comes across—is selfish. It’s about me learning the truth in the most efficient way possible. And that’s not the end of human life. The end of human life is not only to contemplate, not only to know the truth, but also to share it.
And sharing the truth is very complicated, because our audience differs from one moment to another. And the reason why this is so significant is because faith—faith in divine revelation—can’t be taken for granted. Faith in divine revelation is a gift. It’s a theological virtue. It’s a grace infused into the soul by God.
So if I say to you, “Jesus Christ is the Son of God. He is the Second Person of the Blessed Trinity,” and you’re nodding along, saying, “Yes, yes, that’s true,” think about what Jesus said to Peter. When Peter confessed, “You are the Christ, the Son of God,” Jesus said to Peter, “Flesh and blood have not revealed this to you, but my Father, who is in heaven, He has revealed this to you.” That’s the grace of faith at work.
So if I start rattling off articles of faith, if I recite the Apostles’ Creed, and you say “Amen” to every one of the articles, it’s not because you’re smart, it’s not because I’m a good teacher, or because the Apostles’ Creed is written really well. It’s because you possess this grace of faith. And so when I talk to you, if I discern that you have the grace of faith, I can talk to you in terms of faith, and you will receive divine revelation. You will receive theological arguments.
If I want to tell you that you should not commit adultery, I can persuade you by quoting the Ten Commandments, because I know that you fear God and you believe that he revealed the Ten Commandments. If I turn around and talk to an unbeliever, if I recite the Apostles’ Creed, he’ll look at me like I’m crazy. He doesn’t believe any of those things.
If I say, “Hey, as I read these, if you agree, nod yes,” and I say the first line, “I believe in God, the Father almighty,” and he’s already shrugging his shoulders, saying, “No, I don’t believe that. I don’t believe in God.” And we can just go through the whole creed, and he’s going to shake off every single article, saying, “I don’t, I don’t believe that’s true. How can I know that’s true? What proof is there that God created the heavens and the earth? I have no idea if that’s true. I believe in the Holy Catholic Church. I mean, isn’t this what we’re arguing about? And of course, I don’t believe in the Holy Catholic Church. I’m not even a Christian.”
So you can see that a different audience—I can’t assume the grace of faith. And so when I’m talking to a person who doesn’t have faith, it should be my intention, because I’m a rational creature and I’m moved by charity to help this person. It should be my goal to listen and hear his thoughts, opinions, judgments, maybe even beliefs, and refute what’s false. Show him that false opinions that he holds can be proven false.
This is the work that Socrates did. Socrates really doesn’t teach any truth. Socrates refutes error, and he does so by using dialectical reasoning to let the person hang himself with his own rope. When someone asserts something that’s false, Socrates uses that assertion to eventually hang the person because it’s false. And if your reasoning begins on a false assertion, and we continue reasoning from that false assertion, we will eventually run into the failure of your belief system. We’ll run into contradictions that will prove that the consequences of what you’ve asserted are impossible, and this will prove that your assertion is false.
That’s what Socrates can do. The Socratic method is not a method of instruction. It’s not a teaching method—all this modern nonsense. The Socratic method is the means by which we reason with someone who does not believe, who does not accept our principles, and show him that his principles lead to contradictions that destroy his position.
This is why the knowledge of philosophy is important for Christians, because we spend time, or we should spend time, speaking with and trying to help unbelievers. I can’t give my neighbor the grace of faith. I can pray for it. I can pray that God would give him the grace of faith, but to discharge my duty as a Christian, and more particularly as a Dominican, as a preacher, what I can do for anyone is show him that his assumptions are false.
And the goal of that work is not to win and high-five my Christian friends. The goal of that work is to introduce doubt into the mind of an unbeliever who remains a rational creature. The goal is to introduce doubt so that even if a person is an unbeliever and rejects all of my principles, through strategic discussion, making use of the art of dialectical reasoning, I can leave him in a state of doubt, where he begins questioning his assumptions and beliefs. And that’s my goal with an unbeliever.
Now, I could also talk to someone who is religious, who holds some of my religious principles, but not all. For example, I could speak with a Muslim and I could say, “Well, nod your head if you believe what I believe. I believe in God the Father Almighty.” And the Muslim may hear that, think for a moment, and say, “Yes, I believe in God, the Father Almighty, maker of heaven and earth.” The Muslim would nod and say, “Yes, I believe that God is almighty and that he is the maker of heaven and earth.” And I would say, “And in his Son,” and that would be the end of our agreement. We would agree that God is almighty and that he is the maker of heaven and earth. So I would have some theological principles to work with, to reason with a Muslim, that I would not have with an unbeliever.
If I were to have a conversation with a Jew, the discussion would have gotten just as far as with a Muslim. As soon as we get to the Second Person of the Trinity, agreement ends. But if I was talking with a Protestant, we might get through most of the Apostles’ Creed. In fact, he might think he believes in all of the articles of the Apostles’ Creed, but we’d find that there are problems with the definitions of terms, because Protestantism is based on the fallacy of equivocation, where definitions change. You keep nodding to the articles of faith, but I don’t think you know what they mean.
For example, do you believe in the Holy Catholic Church? The Protestant will say yes, but then he’ll give you some wild explanation of what that phrase means. We can see that in the writings of John Calvin, an attempt to redefine “Holy Catholic Church” to mean something that it never meant in the history of Christianity. And you can see how the arguments developed there.
So our audience differs with respect to what it’s willing to grant us in terms of principles for discussion and argumentation. St. Thomas Aquinas explains that if a person doesn’t accept any of our principles, all we can do is attempt to refute his principles. But if they grant us some principles, we can reason from them constructively to demonstrate the truth of our beliefs.
So that’s why it’s important to keep philosophy and theology separate. That’s why I say you’re not going to do better than Aristotle in teaching moral philosophy. That doesn’t mean you can’t teach morality better, but you’re going to depend on theological assumptions that require the grace of faith. So you’re not actually making arguments that are better than Aristotle’s. You’re making arguments that are better than Aristotle’s for people who believe. And that’s the difference.
Our mission as Christians is not just to speak with people who already believe everything we do. It’s to go into the world where we can’t assume any agreement and make disciples. That’s the Great Commission.
So when we come up through history and we look at this path of human learning, we see that there are these two separate streams, as it were: philosophy developed by human reason and theology received through divine revelation. Mixing them together doesn’t necessarily make something better. That’s actually a fallacy, by the way. That’s the fallacy of composition. It doesn’t make something better because we need both of them. We need both of them.
We need to study to understand the truth from a philosophical or rational perspective. We also need to study to learn and understand the truth from a theological or faith-based perspective. And that’s why you hear this phrase “faith and reason” talked about, because the two of them represent these two different parts of this path of human learning—part of it natural and rational, part of it supernatural and theological.
So now again, that’s what I think. I think you’ve got that a little bit confused. What you’re saying makes sense in the sense that “Wouldn’t it be best to create like one mega book that just puts all of this together once and for all?” And the answer is no, actually, that would not be better. That would not be better because of the nature of truth and how it is that we come to know that something is true.
And again, I think that what you should ask yourself is, “Are you thinking about the true human mission, which is to contemplate and to share the fruits of contemplation? To know Christ, right? If you know the truth, the truth will set you free. That’s great. But it’s also your responsibility to go into the world and make disciples in your own way, of course. But the mission is twofold.”
The audience is complex. There’s a right time to say one thing, a wrong time to say that same thing. There’s a right argument for one person, and that same argument can be wrong for another person. That’s why one lesson we learn in our Dominican formation, as the Order of Preachers, is the importance of the virtue of discretion. Discretion is that ability to know or judge what’s appropriate in different circumstances.
It’s just like a doctor, a physician, trying to diagnose a problem. He can’t just speak in universal terms and say, “Oh, you know, you’ve got this problem. Oh, the cause is this, and the remedy is that.” The individual patients that he has differ. They differ in many different ways, and so he’s got to adjust his diagnosis. The doctor has to know the difference between different patients. So the question is not “What remedies this problem for man?” but “What remedies this problem for Mr. Smith here, and what’s going to remedy a similar problem for Mrs. Jones, who, even though they describe the same problem, their circumstances are different, their physical condition is different,” and so on.
So because the work of preaching is complex, we need to retain the complexity of that system of learning. So no, I would not recommend replacing the ancient master texts with modern syntheses that try to weave them all together. In fact, I think that it’s not wise to assume that that’s going to produce something that’s better.
We could say that the Summa Theologiae does this, but the Summa Theologiae is intended for a Christian audience. The Summa Theologiae assumes that the readers are Catholics who accept the articles of faith. So the Summa Theologiae is actually addressed to students who are both rational creatures and believers. If you go and read the Summa Contra Gentiles, you’ll find something different. You’ll find Thomas Aquinas speaking more to the world in philosophical terms. It’s why those two different books exist.
So anyway, I think that that’s clear. But those are some great questions. Like I said, if Christians, Catholics especially, would have asked questions like this in the 1990s when the fake classical education movement was running wild, and everybody was just jumping on the bandwagon, asking no questions, asking for no evidence, asking for no historical proof that what they were doing was what any wise men, any saints, ever recommended or did anywhere, Catholic education would be at a very different place today than it is.
There’s so much confusion now because an idea of classical education that really has nothing to do with this idea of classical education—which was actually started by a Protestant movement—has spread all over the place and caused all kinds of confusion. But these are the kinds of questions that Catholics should be asking. Catholics should be demanding proof. They should be demanding historical evidence. They should be demanding authoritative sources. They should be demanding examples from saints and doctors of the Church. But they don’t, and so we’ve got a real mess.
But anyway, I recently published an article that I think can help with this a little more. It’s called “The Classical School Spectrum.” Check that article out. If you just go on the blog and scroll down a bit, maybe 10 articles down as of today, you’ll find an article on the classical school spectrum, which illustrates that a little bit. I think that’ll be helpful.
But anyway, those are great questions—the kinds of questions Catholics should be asking. And you ask the questions, I’m happy to get into the answers, because in the Classical Liberal Arts Academy, we’re not afraid of questions like these. We’re doing the research. We’re making sure that what we do has reasons for it. We’re making sure that what we do has precedent, that it’s actually what should be done based on the actual teaching of these philosophical sciences and theological sciences. And that’s why our curriculum in 2026, with all the advantages that we have, looks the way it does.
So I hope that’s helpful, and thank you for the questions. If you’d like to ask any further questions, either send me another email or feel free to comment below the video if you’re listening to this on YouTube. I appreciate the time you took to send those questions, and I hope that’s helpful.
God bless you.
Mr. William C. Michael, O.P.
Headmaster
Classical Liberal Arts Academy
