By Randall Smith.

One of the hardest goals to achieve in Catholic education is an embodiment in practice of the vision Pope John Paul II laid out in Ex corde ecclesiae and in his encyclical Fides et Ratio: an education animated both by the truths of faith and the truths of reason. As John Paul II expressed beautifully at the beginning of Fides et Ratio: "Faith and reason are like two wings on which the human spirit rises to the contemplation of truth; and God has placed in the human heart a desire to know the truth - in a word, to know Himself - so that, by knowing and loving God, men and women may also come to the fullness of truth about themselves."

In the modern world, we seem to be fans of divorce: separating things meant to be kept together in a fruitful communion. In education, we depend on disciplinary divisions and teach our students to compartmentalize their minds as well as their lives. Contemporary education teaches them about work and little or nothing about marriage and family. It teaches them technical knowledge without imparting wisdom about its use in a full, flourishing human life lived in communion with others.

As T. S. Eliot warns in The Waste Land:

Son of man,

You cannot say, or guess, for you know only

A heap of broken images.

Catholic education is not immune from this fragmentation. And to the common fragmentation between the academic disciplines, it often adds its own divorce between the life of the mind and the life of the soul, between the truths of faith and the truths of reason.

For some, a Catholic education is about "getting young people to Heaven," and so the focus is on piety rather than on educational excellence. Others view a "Catholic" education as essentially no different from a non-Catholic or secular education, directed primarily at "success" as the secular world understands that term, involving some combination of wealth, power, status, in the realization of one's creative self-expressive individualism.

What both approaches to education miss is that a Catholic education could be of the highest quality and lead people to God, and vice versa, that an education leading people to God could produce the highest quality education.

If we need to be reminded of this, we can turn to the great Fathers and Doctors of the Church, such as Sts. Basil, Gregory of Nyssa, and Gregory of Nazianzen in the East, and St. Augustine, St. Thomas Aquinas, and St. Bonaventure in the West, men who combined great intellect with great faith and devotion to God.

A profound example of the marriage of intellect and faith, academic learning and creative imagination, can be found in St. Bonaventure's Journey of the Mind into God. The Latin title is Itinerarium mentis in deum, and that little word mens, mentis can be translated either as "mind" or "soul." Itinerarium is obviously the precursor to our word "itinerary." It is a guide for the journey.

Bonaventure's itinerary of the ascent of the mind into God was inspired, he tells us, by St. Francis's vision of a six-winged seraphic angel with two wings covering its feet, two in the middle of its body, and two over its head. In its center, Francis saw a vision of the crucified Christ that imparted to him the stigmata, the wounds of Christ in his own flesh.

Bonaventure associates the two wings of the angel pointing downward with the vision of God we get from our contemplation of creation. The two in the middle of the angel's body, he associates with the vision of God we get from looking within ourselves. And the top two wings pointing above, he associates with the glimpses we get of God from reflecting on God as the Source of all Being, on the one hand, and the Source of all Goodness, on the other.

But what is above all that? Remember that at the center of the six-winged creature is the crucified Christ. What completely transcends the mind? What goodness and love is so great that we cannot even begin to grasp it by our intellect alone?

The fact that God has become flesh and ...