The Catholic Mind

The Christian Classical Tradition

Education is about far more than acquiring information, passing examinations or preparing for employment. Its highest purpose is to form the whole person: to help us recognise truth, love what is good, delight in what is beautiful and order our lives towards God.

A person may possess a great deal of information without possessing wisdom. We may know how to accomplish many things without knowing which things are worth accomplishing. Christian education therefore begins with the most important questions: What is true? What is the human person? What makes a life good? What is our final purpose? How should we live in order to attain it?

This series introduces the Christian classical tradition. Its centre is not the pagan world with Christianity added afterwards, but Christ, the eternal Word through whom all things were made. Holy Scripture, the Fathers of the Church and the great Christian teachers provide its governing light.

We shall encounter figures such as St Augustine, Cassiodorus, Boethius, St Isidore of Seville, St Bede, Alcuin, Hugh of St Victor and St Thomas Aquinas. We shall also explore the seven liberal arts, the Christian habits of reading and memory, the relationship between faith and reason, the search for wisdom and the place of beauty, virtue, silence and contemplation.

Christians did receive much that was true and useful from the ancient world. They did not, however, receive it uncritically. What was good was preserved, what was false was corrected, and the whole inheritance was placed at the service of divine truth. Pagan writers will therefore appear where they help us understand the development of the arts, but they will not provide the spiritual or moral centre of this course.

No previous study is required. Each instalment will explain one important idea in accessible language, introduce a Christian writer or tradition, and offer questions or practical exercises. The purpose is not merely to learn about the past, but to recover habits that we urgently need today: attention rather than distraction, reason rather than slogans, memory rather than constant novelty, wisdom rather than mere information, and contemplation rather than restlessness.

True education should make us not proud, but humble; not merely clever, but wise; not simply knowledgeable, but capable of living well. At its summit, Christian learning leads beyond itself to prayer, worship and the knowledge and love of God.