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Philosophy of the Curriculum

Unity of All Truth

Any university worthy of the name is committed to searching for truth and, as far as possible, to finding it. Moreover, it is obliged to pass on the great deposit of truth discovered and confirmed by succeeding generations. But a university must not limit itself to one region of truth to the exclusion of others; it is open to all truth. Venerable John Henry Newman has explained in a masterful way the manner in which the professors and students of a university grow into this unity of truth. They do not just accumulate truths, learning one after another, but they see these truths in relation to each other so that they illuminate each other and reality. Professors lead their students in developing a sense of the unity of knowledge, so that they never forget the whole when they study the parts. In this way, as Newman writes, they do not just enlarge their learning, but they begin to grow in the wisdom that “discerns the whole in each part, the end in each beginning . . . because it [wisdom] always knows where it is, and how its path lies from one point to another.”

This unity of all knowledge is ultimately rooted in the order of God and creation, an order that possesses a hierarchical structure: God, the Blessed Trinity and emanating from Him, the various levels of creatures. Not only, then, is there a vast unity to all creation, which, in turn, accounts for the unity of all forms of knowledge, but there is a natural order of priority in these forms of knowledge. Since its founding, the College deliberately selected the liberal arts as the center of its curriculum because of their focus on what is primary.

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