The Classics and Catholic Intellectual Life

Feast of St. Joseph of Cupertino, 2026

Dear Friends of St. Augustine School,

I recently came across this curriculum centered on the two volume Golden Thread. I read them in the spring and think that they're helpful for faculty as background for their history (and perhaps literature and theology) courses. One might even photocopy a section and use it in class.

It is important to note that this is not a Catholic or Christian resource. It is a traditional approach to the past that is both accessible to and engages with modernity. It is very good. Indeed, there's a way in which a Catholic is likely to be more aligned with a traditional approach in an age which tends to discard the past. 

And yet, the merely conservative isn’t Catholic. I want to use this note as an excuse to reflect a bit on classical education in the US. Since about 1980, and especially in the past ten years, we have experienced  a renaissance of classical education. One of the things that hasn’t been clarified, however, is the relationship of the classics (or Great Books) to Christianity.

Recently a number of Catholic schools have popped up or changed into what are called classical schools. This can mean a number of things. For some it means a renewed study of great books, including the pagan classics on their own terms, with various degrees of Catholicism built in (daily mass, religious iconography, rosaries). While very good, I think that we need to think more deeply about the relationship of the classics to a Catholic education.

Let me talk about what we should do by thinking about the history of the reception of the classics. The renaissances (“rebirths”) in both the Latin West and Byzantine East have involved rediscovering the pagan classics. The Byzantines, who went through renaissances in the ninth, twelfth, and fourteenth centuries, are a bit less familiar to us so I’ll focus on the the Latin West. 

In the ninth century Charlemagne commissioned his court theologian Alcuin to recover the roots of Christianity. Perhaps surprisingly Alcuin did this in part by recovering the ancient classics that had been ignored- especially Cicero, Virgil, Sallust and Terrence. Monks and teachers at this time were interested in using these authors to expand their vocabulary, think more precisely, spur their students on to moral improvement, and to understand the ancient world. Ultimately, however, they were interested in going to the classics to better understand Christ. The twelfth century saw something similar (Jean LeClerq is fundamental here). In the thirteenth century scholastics gained access to Aristotle and his later Muslim commentators. Thinkers like Albert the Great and Thomas Aquinas used Aristotelian thought to better understand the natural world, natural theology, and to clarify the pressing doctrinal questions that had arisen since St. Anselm and Abelard.

The fifteenth century Renaissance, starting in Italy, also went back to the pagan classics. I believe that the Italian Renaissance has often been misunderstood. Machiavelli was an outlier. Other figures who downplayed Christianity such as Lorenzo Valla were second rate thinkers. The key authors such as Ficino and Pico della Mirandola (and their precursors Dante and Petrarch) went back to the classics to renew Christian life. Erasmus and St. Thomas More continued in the same vein.

It seems no accident to me that the study of Greek and Latin began to tank in 1918 in Europe and America after the collapse of the old order. “Civilized” men were seen to be barbarians in World War I. More fundamentally, it was also the time when Christianity lost its hold among the educated classes.

Why did T. S. Eliot write in the 1930s that if Greek and Latin were to be renewed it could only be done through the Church? I think he saw it for three reasons: 1. Eliot knew that the old classical order was waning into frivolity and mere aestheticism at least since Virgil died in 19 BC, and in the Greek world since Alexander the Great. The only thing that preserved the classics in the West since then was Christianity. That is, the classical world was intellectually and morally exhausted and collapsing in on itself in the years leading up to Christ; 2. He knew that the renewal of the classics in the moral, spiritual and aesthetic realms had only happened under Christian impulses; 3. He knew that the recent history of classical scholarship and education had tended, since at least the 1840s in England and Germany, to be reduced to thoughtless philology. (Nietzsche saw this too).

The only thing, I am convinced, that can sustain the study of classics in a living way is Christianity. At the time of Christ, the whole classical world was dying; it had lost its metaphysical support. It is no surprise that it was the late classical authors such as Juvenal invented satire. There was nothing to sustain the classical world. Christians revived it, and transformed it.  Christ, the center of history and metaphysics, has proven strong enough to support the best instincts of the classical world. History has demonstrated this.

In all of the sustained revivals of the classics, there has been a genuine enthusiasm for classical culture. But the beating heart of those renaissances has been Christianity.

As the culture moves away from Christ it doesn't surprise me that it discards Western civilization. As we develop as a school, we can think more about how religion is the basis of every culture- not just Christianity the basis of the West. I think that Christopher Dawson is very helpful on this point.

The Jesuit Walter Ong wrote in 1962 that education needs to be constantly reformed. It seems to me that St. Augustine School is contributing to the current reformation of Catholic education, and it is very exciting to be a part of it! While remaining faithful to our mission and the habits of being that we are establishing (a vision of reality formed by the Incarnation, the sacramental imagination and attentiveness to Christ, reality, and each other), we make time for ongoing, slow, fruitful reflection. Once we have thought more about the question of the Christian reception of the classics we can develop our idea of analogical reading. While the Church remains faithful to the Apostolic Deposit, new situations require rethinking our modes of communication. In the long run we intend to draw on our friends who are specialists in Augustine’s thought and come to a more profound understanding of Augustine’s claim that Christ is more fundamentally the teacher than the adult in front of the classroom.

In Christ,

Matthew Briel